Last edited 7-17-2004

I attended the National Communications Forum (NCF) on 10/26/99.
I wanted to hear the Global Crossing CEO talk at noon.
Unfortunately, he was a no show. We were informed that he canceled a week ago.
Flyers were already printed and mailed out... oh well.

However, I attended some interesting talks that day.

Cisco e-commerce

The best was an internet commerce talk by Cisco at an e-commerce session.
Jeff Graham. Business Solutions Manager. Very clearly delivered.
Jeff stated that he is not a techie and had no typical Cisco "hockey puck"
routers in his slides. His overall message was that Cisco uses e-business
itself. He describes how they use it and how it benefits them as a company. (saved $825M in 1999)
He then said that Cisco "Evangelists" (in-house consultants) take this story
to their customers and basically say, "hey, it helps us run our business, it
should help you run your business."

How do they do it? Basically, they use the http://www.cisco.com  web site
to handle at lot of interactions with their registered users:

• Customers
  • 90% customer docs on the web
  • Installation Guides are on the web
  • they get 15 (or was that 50) thousand downloads per week
  • 80% of questions are answered on-line
  • 80% of orders are done on-line
  • 60% of orders are not touched by a Cisco person (web& outsourcing help)
  • Website is also used for marketing & news releases
  • Website is used for training registration...  cheaper than a phone call which costs $2-3.
• Suppliers
• Employees
  • Expense reports on-line. Therefore, only 4 people are needed to process these reports
         for all 20,000 Cisco employees. ( note: there were 3000 Employees in 1995)
  • Cisco stock portfolio (options tracking etc.) on-line... not just quotes
• Partners
  • Cisco owns 2 of their 10 factories (8 are outsourced) the web is used to communicate
     with the 8.

By using internet commerce, Cisco saved $825M in 1999... up $500M from 1998.

He also mentioned that competitors use the web site to get competitive info about Cisco.
He didn't seem too concerned about it.

This started off as a bulletin board from Cisco's engineers for use by their customers.

He said that if you want to try this, start with something small & visible...and he noted
that everything in the process is touched, not just technology.

He admitted that people who do business with Cisco tend to be more into technology and
would use their web based systems more than say, a Home Depot. Traditional Bell System
companies  have tended to want to protect their customers from having to deal with too 
much technology.  Maybe it is time for a change.

During the Q&A session, someone asked how voice fits in. Answer: "Click to Talk" in the
customer care arena. They want to allow for choice in how the customer decides to interact
with Cisco. Someone asked if there was a premium price for running on a private extranet
vs. the internet. Answer: 25-50% premium on price but Cisco uses the internet for these
mission critical applications and it appears to be running quite well...

My observation. I think that companies like Cisco and Microsoft have excellent web sites
because they have to. They tend to have a lot of small customers (many just one person)
and can't give them personal attention. They have to use automation to serve them. Traditional
Bell System companies, on the other hand, tend to have 3-5 huge customers with 30 or so small ones..
and many of the small ones are huge companies that they haven't done that much business with yet.
They can afford to give more personal attention to these types of customers.
However, the Cisco approach is compelling. It should be considered
to more effectively work with current customers/suppliers/etc. and to open the door to working
with many small partners/customers/etc. ala Microsoft/Cisco.

Another Speaker in the e-commerce session noted that in one business to business
application, $0.5M/yr. in postage was saved. How? healthcare for an auto company.
The two companies, health care and auto, were making 6000 transactions per day 
between them. Most with $0.33 postage.


Service Ideas from another session. 

Put a web server on an SCP for web access ... but can people at home provision their own services?

• Restrict your kid from calling a kid down the street
•  Restrict the number of minutes each kid can use per day.. both phone minutes & internet minutes
• Change your single number service yourself... The speaker said that one of the reasons traditional
       single number service hasn't been as successful as it could have been, is that the telco had to hire
      staff to handle the call ins for updates... to expensive. As an aside, two years ago I heard that the
      do-it-yourself provisioning wasn't successful since it was done via touch-tone.. too difficult. Maybe
      the web interface will help.

Misc. tidbits:

• The future of the Internet?
  Your appliances are connected to the internet.
  Your house is connected to the internet.
  Imagine any expensive resource
  (e.g., Photo, Brain Surgeon, Electron Microscope). You can now use it without going to it.
  
• I've attended a number of conferences over the past year. IP seems to be the consensus
  for the future. ATM is dead. Circuit is old news.
  
• SUN (Joyce Graham)
  • advocates going after the high-end customers first. Business Customers and high-end homes.
  • Sees wide spread rollout of IP telephony over cable in the next 1-1.5 yrs.
    AT&T has already started in Denver.
  • Telcos & Electric Cos may converge
  • Cable & Wireless are convergence players (not DSL)
    
• Qwest
  • T1 was $1200/local loop... now $250/ local loop
  • DS3 was $8000/mo... now $1500/mo.
  • now $8/GB transfer over the internet... will get to 1$/GB... when that happens,
    lots of video applications (e.g., more TV channels, interactive TV, training videos) open up....
    
• Putting together the ideas from several speakers, there is more data traffic (bits) than
  voice traffic but voice revenue is about 80% of all revenue. How can this be? A pricing
  anomaly. A sort of arbitrage that can be exploited in the short term but will go away
  in the long term. There is talk of flat-rate long distance, even internationally. Settlement
  rates are coming down. There is talk of bundling. One flat fee for internet access and phone access.
  I think that AT&T has already started down this path.
  
• 93% of enterprises still use dial-up. I guess that Lucent is unusual with a LAN.
  I suspect that big tech companies have LANs.. the place that they are likely needed
  the most.
  
• There are 750,000 commercial office building in the USA. 10,000 have fiber.
  
• 250Mb/s works great for sending packet HDTV over the internet to a projection screen
  bigger than one used at the conference keynote room. (i.e., huge)
  No visible transmission problems.
  
• I noticed that several speakers mentioned children. At first, it appeared to be
  the usual "my kids are better than I am with a PC" or
  "teenagers are always on the phone" remark. But they seemed to be very
  serious about this. During one Q&A, I started a discussion on ease-of-use noting
  that letting people use to web to do their own call forwarding changes is much better
  than using a touch-tone keypad, but most average people are still having a hard time
  programming their VCRs...even with VCR Plus and other attempts by the VCR industry
  to make things easy. It seemed that a purely passive (like caller ID) is the only thing
  that gets high usage. It was mentioned, however, that teenagers tend to use the top of the line
  communications services (pagers, text messaging, internet, etc.) and have NO problem
  figuring out how to use it. One speaker said that his 7 year old kid thought that a TV program
  about how to surf the web was insane. It was like watching a show about how to watch a show!
  "see Dad change channels with the remote". So maybe they really are the target audience that we
  should be marketing to them as well as the baby boom people we have always been targeting.

Anthony Clark