Speaking at the Cisco C-Scape Global Forum (formerly the company's Analyst Conference) in San Jose, Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers said the new technologies being pushed by the networking giant will not only boost productivity across industries but "will give rise to new business models as we engage consumers and business users in new ways."

In early November, Cisco reported strong results including a 37% rise year-over-year in quarterly profits, but the San Jose, Calif.-based company has seen its share price tumble after Chambers warned that short-term growth could be slowed by IT-spending pullbacks in the credit-strapped financial sector.

Longer term, the always upbeat Chambers is nothing if not optimistic. Online video, videoconferencing and "telepresence," and Web 2.0 technologies such as podcasts and blogs will drive a huge spike in demand for network capacity, and fuel profitable growth for Cisco over the next several years. "In short," he said in the company's November earnings call, "we are going to attempt to execute a very similar strategy over the next decade to what we did in the early 1990s."

Telepresence -- a room-sized multiple-screen system for face-to-face meetings between users in multiple locations -- is the flagship technology for what Cisco terms the next wave of collaboration and business-model transformation. In his presentation at the C-Scape forum, Chambers declared, "I spend over 50% of my time touching customers around the world. In the next year I expect to double the number of customers I touch, while cutting my travel in half."

Cutting travel time and expense, however, is only the first and most obvious benefit of telepresence and the other technologies that Cisco is touting. In speeches and presentations around the world over the last few months Chambers has predicted that "the fundamental nature of work will change," adding that Cisco itself is the "first guinea pig" to try out each of the new technologies and methods.

One visible sign of the new approach is the way Cisco's internal organization: from a traditional "command and control" hierarchy, the company has formed a series of "councils" (to spot and go after market opportunities of at least $10 billion), "boards" ($1 billion opportunities) and task forces (to implement and execute the strategies) that cut across the company's existing organizational structure.

Since the tech bubble burst in 2001, Chambers says, the IT industry has failed to deliver innovative and disruptive new models to boost productivity. The advent of user-generated, highly interactive and collaborative Web 2.0 technologies will change that, he believes.

"Instead of doing one major project a year, as we did in the 2000-06 time frame, this year I did two," he said in an interview prior to the Global Forum "This [next] year if I want to do 20, Bingo! I can. Each of our teams can suddenly do that, once the process is enabled by the Web 2.0 capability."

Cisco, which acquired online collaboration tech provider WebEx in March for $3.2 billion, is facing established competitors in many of the new application and service markets it's entering. Hewlett Packard, for example, has a successful telepresence system that competes directly with Cisco's. Cisco executives believe their end to end systems and their established customer base will trump the competition.

"In the last six month I'm not aware of any [telepresence] opportunity where we lost out to a competitor," stated Marthin De Beer, senior vice president for Cisco's emerging technologies group, at a press luncheon Tuesday.