Full transcript: Ian Foddering on London Real
0:34 Silicon Real. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real.
0:48 It’s a similar show, but it’s for famous people. No, I’m just kidding. We’ve had people like Timan’s not famous. Ian is actually one of our more famous. We’ve had, you know, people like Tim Ferriss doing the 4-hour everything.
1:03 We’ve had celebrity astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and even the British MP George Galloway. So more famous people and the famous actor. Yeah, we have Ashley Walters from Top Boy on this Sunday. So, I can’t wait. I almost emailed you to send me a copy.
1:18 An early release. Really? Okay. I wouldn’t put you in that situation. You’re part of the inner circle.
1:22 So I wouldn’t put you there. We might be able to get there. So, you can check that show out at londonreal.tv. But we’re here today to talk tech. My co-host is Mr. Colin Pyle.
1:32 The coffee man of the hour, Crew Cafe, is doing well. It’s everywhere. We just drank some. How’s business? Business is good.
1:39 Yeah, things are going really good. Just super busy. Got hay fever right now. Just found out my motorcycle got stolen a few weeks ago, I was mentioning. And so, they’re just riding it off.
1:49 Such a very sad day. So, they didn’t find it. They’re not. No, they found it, but the cost to fix it is the same as the cost of bikes. And are you going to ditch the motorcycle?
1:58 So, I have no choice. They’re going to cut me a check, so I may buy another one, but this is I’m bikeless for the first time in long. Okay. This is a good thing, your lifespan just increased. There we go.
2:06 Yeah. So, we’ll go with that. We’ll go with it. Awesome. Let’s get on with the show.
2:11 Our guest today is Mr. Ian Foddering, who is the chief technology officer and technical director for Cisco in the UK and Ireland. If you have not been part of the general public and don’t know who they are, they are a multinational corporation. They’re part of the S&P 500. They design, manufacture, and sell networking hardware. I just found out that Cisco is short for San Francisco.
2:34 That’s four years MIT education. I just figured that out. I didn’t know that. You didn’t know that? And the icon is the San Francisco Bridge.
2:41 I didn’t know that either. So those lines is kind of. And it’s what a great, you know, metaphor with the network and the bridging. I mean, those Stanford grads were thinking, so definitely you guys have a lot things going here on the UK. You have the Cisco Network Academy.
2:55 You guys are now running the IoT challenge where you’re giving away a 4 million dollars to startups in the IoT space. You guys support the idea London, which is right around the corner, who has was it Jennifer Griffith that was here from Snap Fashion? So lots of exciting things going on. The best coffee in all of London. They’re serving that.
3:12 They serve Crew Cafe as well. Shameless plug. Expect more of those from Colin. But Ian, thanks so much for being here and welcome to Silicon Real. No, you’re very welcome.
3:20 Thank you for having me. You know, it’s fantastic to talk about IoT and IoE. I don’t know the difference between them. I know you guys reckon that potentially 50 billion things will be connected to the internet by year 2020. Is that about right?
3:33 What does that look like? I get a little scared. I can’t picture what that looks like. Like the Jetsons or something. Yeah.
3:40 No, no. It’s really interesting. And I mean I’m talking to a lot of different businesses, organizations, public, private sector at the moment. Even my parents are asking about IoE at the moment. But it just generates so much interest because there’s such a world of possibilities.
3:54 I think, you know, a number of years ago when you started talking about this topic, it was the connected fridge. Everyone straight away honed in on the connected fridge. Take that bottle of milk out and, you know, it reorder itself and stuff like that. But it’s expanding. It’s expanding rapidly.
4:08 And, you know, it started with the, you know, the mobile drive of mobile devices, tablets etc. But what we’re now seeing is an acceleration of other things being connected. So whether it’s going to be, you know, the connected asthma inhaler, which I love as an example. We can come back to that later on. Right the way through to the connected cow.
4:28 So forget the fridge, forget the milk, think about the cow before the milk even gets made and then going into the fridge through to transportation, healthcare and there’s just so many possibilities and there’s some real drivers, some real needs to do this. Healthcare mentioned there briefly is, I think, such a key area. UK, Europe, Western world, we got an aging population. We can carry on doing the things that we’ve done always and build more hospitals and stuff like that, or we can look to technology as a way of actually helping us over this challenge.
4:59 So there’s a world of possibilities out there. So I think it’s a really exciting time and the terms like IoT and IoE, can we define those, just so we know exactly. Yeah, it’s an often asked question. So, from my perspective, it’s a relatively dumb device. It’s something that is embedded within a device, but it’s relatively dumb.
5:20 But IoE is really a collection of elements. So it’s people, process, data and things coming together. And when you start to bring that together, that’s when you get the insight. And again, a lot of people focus in on IoT. For me, actually, it’s the data that those connections are going to produce that’s going to be the interesting stuff.
5:40 And when you start to look at that data, you know, unstructured in all sorts of forms, that’s going to prove some really interesting insight. And I don’t think we really truthfully know quite what we’re going to discover as we start to connect all of these things together. And what we’re going to find in terms of the way in which we live our lives, how we can be more efficient, all sorts of things. It’s a fascinating time. It’s almost like you look at the apps on your mobile phone right now, 5 6 years ago.
6:05 Could you have even conceived those when the iPhone was introduced? Could you even conceive that interactivity? I saw a stamp the other day for someone’s tax minic thing with the phone number next to the tube and I was like, this is obsolete now. Would you have ever predicted? And I mean with the IoE and the IoT, how can you even foresee where we’re going to be?
6:24 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I mentioned it briefly. The example I love to give, cuz it’s a really simple one for people to understand, is, and I use it myself, an asthma inhaler. A lot of people do.
6:37 It’s, you know, a fairly dumb device, but it’s useful in terms of what it does. And one of the trials that they did down in Barcelona, which is very much heralded as a sort of the connected city in Europe and sort of pushing itself forward in terms of, they did a trial, and they had all this connectivity. Well, they have all of this connectivity, but at the same time they were doing this trial with this asthma inhaler which was connected to the network to track usage when, where, how, etc.
7:12 And what they noticed during this pilot was there was a bit of a spike in its use for at a various period of time. They couldn’t quite work out why this was, and you clearly, it was something to do with location, but was there anything else that they could work out? And then when they started putting this together with other data sources, they noticed that the same time that they had this spike in its usage, there was this shipment of soya coming in to the marina.
7:38 And what they’re able to do is correlate the wind direction, speed and all of this stuff, and very quickly actually noticing exactly where this was going to happen. And so you start to take that example, which you know, today using an asthma inhaler, something like that, very reactive, you know, you have an attack, you take it typically. But think about being able to proactively notify someone when they go into a particular area that there is a higher chance that they’ll need to use it.
8:07 Now, it’s a really simpler example, I think, but being able to take something like healthcare and be much more proactive in the delivery of it, reduce the cost, be more streamlined in it, I think it’s a natural way in which we’re going to have to start to turn to technology to help us. It raises interesting questions around privacy, security, which I think is the natural follow-on question when you talk about IoT. But I think all of these can be addressed.
8:33 But it’s about being transparent. You see a bunch of these studies they’ve done on Twitter because Twitter is that open API and it’s so much information, and I know they’ve tried to track, like, epidemics by Twitter, and like there’s so much data you can track by language, which is a famous map in London where you can track the languages around Hyde Park and where there’s Russian and French and all that stuff. So, it kind of shows what is possible when you have that interactive data flow.
8:57 Yeah, absolutely. And on that point, I mean, one of the things that we’re seeing increasingly in terms of the conversations we’re having now with organizations is almost regardless of their vertical, their background, what they actually do, almost every single one of them is now looking at how IoT, IoE can play a part in the way in which they deliver what they do fundamentally. And so, you know, our view is very much that every organization out there is going to become a digital provider in some way.
9:27 And you can look at the likes of Nike, for example. You know, they’re a fitness, fashion, sports label, but look at what they’re doing with the data they’re collecting from their service and how they’re changing the way in which they address their business model. And there’s many many different examples. I just think it’s a really interesting time at the moment. Yeah.
9:45 Like this morning, I was watching Bloomberg and Barclays was on. So they just released the new sort of wristband Barclaycard, and so you can, you know, you have a wristband and it’s connected and you know you can connect it to a credit card or a debit card and start paying for things and uploading it and it’s pretty interesting, right? So here’s this old school institution like the banking where people think it’s way far behind and they’re, you know, even they’re on it too.
10:12 So it’s amazing what’s connected now. I mean, we know that, like, engines and 747s connected. But I don’t know, like, kind of where the state is now, and then you talk about in the future cows being connected. So like where are we roughly now and where do you kind of expect us to be going? So I think the, well, the cow example is happening now.
10:33 There’s a company out there in Holland. I think it is Sparkle or Sparkle, yeah, Sparkle, I think it is. They’re actually doing this. They’re collecting data from cows. But the reason that they’re doing, and there is a good reason.
10:46 It’s not just because they can. You learn more about these things than I ever thought I ever would. But cows naturally don’t have any outward sign of being unwell. You know, they’ve developed over time, evolution to sort of hide all illnesses so they can’t get picked off by predators. So from a farming perspective, it’s really difficult to know whether your livestock is unwell until it’s too late and potentially too costly.
11:11 And so being able to track it actually allows you to notify blood thinning or if it’s temperatures raising or whatever it is. So you can actually start to treat it again earlier. So we’ve got things like that already out there. The engine example that you talked about, I mean there’s a huge amount of data now being produced by the likes of a Rolls-Royce engine. But we’re also increasingly beginning to see examples of, we’ve had conversation recently actually with a health trust about how they could start to better connect to an ambulance.
11:45 And now there’s a very good reason again why you’d want to do that, because if you have a head trauma and, unfortunately, being a motorcyclist you’ll know this, you know, if there’s a golden hour that if you have a head trauma then you’ve got to get, you know, some early stage information back to start treating that individual, but the time to bring someone back into hospital, all of this sort of stuff, can delay the treatment, therefore the recovery. So, being able to connect to a paramedic while out in the field and provide some real-time data back to the hospital and start the treatment of that person, free up some of the necessary equipment so when that person comes in, you know, all of these things are beginning to play out, and that’s happening today.
12:27 We’re having those conversations, being able to stream high-definition video from that paramedic back to the hospital. All of these things are happening today, and it’s, I say, an interesting area. What’s the slowdown, do you think, of it just not going everywhere, cuz you know, the technology is kind of there, right? It’s kind of, it’s the adoption from, you know, a lot of the companies and, you know, governments and stuff like that, just cuz I love this stuff.
12:56 If you could put a chip in me, I’d be right. I would for sure. And it’s just, I just sometimes wonder what, like, let’s just get on with it. Well, I think if you look back over time, I think one of the biggest barriers for almost any technology is traditionally down to culture. It’s mindset change.
13:11 It’s being willing to embrace things. And certainly I see that a lot in a lot of organizations I deal with. The want, the need to change. I think same applies here. I think there is still a degree of concern, hesitancy, around, you know, what exactly is it that I’m sharing if I’m connected to your example, who has access to that, and I think, you know, the scenario that we have today where if you sign up to an application or you sign up to a service there’s a set of T’s and C’s that in theory everyone reads but just ticks and accepts you know, that user interface is going to change, you’re not necessarily going to have that ability up front, because if we live in that connected world, we’re going to be work moving seamlessly between one service to to another.
14:00 And so I think that element needs to change. But I think, to me, it’s around the security question. And also it’s around the governance of that data and the data, and, you know, the sovereignty of who actually owns it. Arguably, at the moment, the pendulum is weighted towards the big organizations that are providing these services and, you know, we get some benefit from that data that’s being produced, but it’s not huge and I think, you know, we’re beginning to see, we will, and we will see it more so over time, the pendulum swing back to you and I as individuals, how that data is ultimately used and what we want for that in some cases it will be financial payback, in other cases it may be more altruistic.
14:51 We want to do something a bit more with it, but I think we will see that pendulum swing back, and I think people will feel a bit more comfortable about what they do and how they do it. There was a study recently that said people are more concerned about corporations having their data than, say, the governments, which I found surprised because that’s not primary on my mind, but it said that they were, and this is a big issue going forward, who owns the info and who has the info, especially healthcare info and your body. What can we do about it, or what are you thinking about when you’re, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, clearly there needs to be a very strong governance process in place, and it needs to be very clearly explained, available to people, how that data is being collected and what is happening to that data.
15:36 I think the other challenge is as well, the more and more we start to produce data, you know, we just have to look around today, the ability, the availability of compute power and and stuff like that means that it’s so easy now to actually cross-correlate data. So even though data may be produced separately, the ability to actually cross-correlate, to actually then work out, even if it’s anonymized, you can start to filter down, that will, I think, continue to rise in terms of a challenge, but again it is about being transparent. For me, it’s about ensuring that people understand what is happening to the data how it’s being used and allowing people the option, you know, if people want to disassociate or remove themselves from that, then they should have the ability to do so.
16:28 But equally, you know, I think if you look around today there’s a lot of elements that produce data that people just don’t even consider. I mean, your credit card, your mobile phone, you know, all of this stuff is producing data on a continual basis. And I think sometimes people get a little bit too fixated on some elements whereas actually what they’re challenged with has been around for a long time, but it’s just been done in a slightly different way.
16:53 Yeah. Like loyalty cards have been around for centuries, or decades, and it’s just like that, that’s essentially data play, and people don’t even think twice. But again, it’s back to value. What value do you get by giving up that data? It’s, yeah, you get a few points and some coupons, but the value to the organization collecting it is huge.
17:14 I mean, it’s really valuable stuff, but that’s where I think that pendulum will swing back, and you and I, producing that data, who actually own that data. Yeah. Will get greater return on it. I remember there was a case with Walmart where they were collecting data and then they were actually sending out coupons based upon your buying habits, and, you know, there was like a 16-year-old girl in the US who was, they could tell she was pregnant because of what she was buying, and then, so they sent coupons to her for, like, you know, baby clothes and stuff like that.
17:43 That’s wild. Food she was buying or something. Yeah. But just through the data. But again, that’s a huge privacy issue because they sent the coupons to her family, and her family’s like, “Why are you receiving these coupons?”
17:52 And then that’s kind of what you’re alluding to. Like the correlations. Exactly. So even if it’s anonymous, it’s still not right. Yeah.
17:59 I think we’re all a little precious about our data. I think a lot of people with their Facebook feeds and their, I don’t own this photo, and I mean, we’re looking for trends here. I don’t know. That’s my general feeling, and you give so much info on your mobile phone, like you said, your bank statements, like the bank, the banks have a lot of information about you, you know. They’re probably not using it to the best of their abilities yet.
18:20 I mean, if Google was a bank, you know, they probably would be running those numbers better, but I guess that’s probably changing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there’s a part to play as well, in terms of the way in which sometimes we see the media portray these situations as well, because I think sometimes you it can get sort of blown out of proportion in terms of what is happening and how it’s happening. I think there’s huge value to the individuals in this connected world that we’re talking about going forward.
18:50 But the ability for people to step out of it, that needs to exist, and that’s it. It’s fairly clear to me, right? Be able to opt out, like you can go on your phone and opt out. Absolutely right. Absolutely.
19:02 What are you seeing on the horizon with, say, the IoT challenge or in general, where you see some exciting things coming up with startups, and why do you look outside of Cisco? I’m sure you have really smart people inside your company. Is it the innovator’s dilemma that makes you go out and look at these startups for the next thing? Yeah, it’s an interesting one because we sort of went down this route in the UK probably about 3 four years ago now. It started actually as a bit of a legacy project that we wanted to drive as a result of our London 2012 involvement.
19:32 We felt we wanted to do something a little bit different because a lot of the sponsors and the supporters of London 2012 were doing something sort of that year, and then sort of moving on to the next big thing. But we were really keen to have something that lasted a bit longer. And so we started this innovation program in the UK that would last for 5 years. Now we’re halfway through that, but the reason that we did it was really about just getting new ideas.
19:57 You know, we don’t have exclusive right on good ideas. No organization does. And what we’ve found is we’ve met some fantastic people. I mean, some brilliant people. You talked about Jenny earlier on.
20:08 I mean, amazing mind and capability, and what it’s allowed us to do is just make sure that we’ve got our finger on the pulse in terms of technology, what’s happening out there. Because, best will in the world, you know, we’re a big organization, some 70,000 people around the world, and that can be difficult for any big organization to necessarily move quickly and understand what’s happening as best as it tries. But being tapped into that market, that innovation scene, allows us to get a really good feel for what’s happening.
20:42 I think the thing for us as well was when we went into this space was to make sure that we as the big organization didn’t come in and be seen as sort of farming those good ideas on the cheap and taking them away and using them for ourselves, and that was it. You know, that’s always the suspicion when there’s innovator sponsored by, you know, at Microsoft or whatever, whatever. Everyone’s a little worried about that always. Yeah. And that, to be fair, it was a bit of a challenge for us when we first wanted to go down this route because from a legal perspective it was, well, you know, how do we ensure that we are going to leave those ideas there?
21:16 We’re not going to take them away, and he said, “Well, we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to make sure that when we get involved in this area, we’re working with these organizations that there isn’t a fear that we’re going to take those ideas or we’re going to demand an upfront cut of any future profits or anything like that.” And so we did, we cracked that internally, and we got that resolved. And that’s allowed us to work with a lot of these organizations, which has then led us onto some really good conversations with a lot of our client base, cuz, as I said, you know, almost every organization out there is looking to drive innovation.
21:53 They’re all looking at it slightly differently, but if we can use Ideal London around the corner as you say, and connect some of those organizations, some of those startups, with some of the big organizations that we’re working with on a daily basis and just be seen as a thought leader and connect the two. It has a huge amount of value for us, for the big client, and also for the startup as well in terms of getting access to some big big brands and names. And we’ve had some, you know, good meetings down at Ideal in terms of some of the organizations coming through, public private sector.
22:32 In fact, we even had the South Korean government come over to look at the model that we’ve developed there so that they can look to leverage something similar in Korea, or South Korea. So it’s been really, really interesting for us. We’ve got that location there, and then we’ve got another one over in Greenwich, which is create, which is working on, I guess, more early stage research work, and we tap into the likes of TSB, Technology Strategy Board, leveraging some of the project funds that they’ve got, working with some organizations and just generating, and working through some of the ideas focused principally around IoT.
23:12 Yeah, TSB has funded a few companies that have been in here before. Pixel Pin, I think, maybe even Digital Shadows, I think. Yeah, they write some nice checks for those people. It’s tricky as a company with you, because you’re a mature hardware company, but you have to innovate more than anyone to stay on top of the game, and your customers look to you to innovate, too. So, it’s a very tricky space that you’re in.
23:34 Yeah. And it’s interesting that you mention hardware, because I would absolutely agree that, you know, the starting point for Cisco 30 years ago now when we were the startup company, was as a hardware, but I think very, very quickly it became software, and I’ll try and avoid any of the marketing here, but the reality is, you know, the thing that made Cisco the Cisco router, was the Cisco IOS that sat on that device that kept getting updated. Exactly. And if you look at where we’re going now in terms of an organization, if you look at the application-centric infrastructure, data center propositions, which is all about software and its capability, it’s actually detracted or separated itself from the hardware.
24:18 So I would argue now that we’re much more a 50/50 split between software and hardware than predominantly hardware. But you’re right, that’s where a lot of people still associate ourselves in that. But that’s where the innovation plays in. So we have to constantly innovate and using and working with the startups in and around London, and we also developed a program called the National Virtual Incubator, NVI, so we’ve got about 12 of these locations around the UK and they tap into some of the universities, some of the business startup locations, accelerator locations around the UK, connecting them together through video, holding events, getting third parties to come in and talk about the, you know, the VC space, how that operates, getting some big organizations to come in and talk about some of the challenges they have and how they like to work with startups to address some of these.
25:19 It’s about connecting people with the ideas ultimately, and IoT eyes ideas that are coming down the pike, or can you talk about them, you know, when you see interesting things that companies are doing? Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of different areas. And I think again the definition of IoT is, we’ll go back to that one, because I think people sort of narrow it down too quickly. I mean, we see anything and everything being connected. And so that can be, that can sort of play itself out in a number of different ways.
25:51 I mean, some of the organizations that we’re seeing around location services, how they utilize the connectivity, mobile phone smartphone capabilities, number of different areas. So we’re seeing, I guess, some exciting ideas. We are are working with a number of them in the UK, which is really good, because again, as a, I guess, as a US company, certainly headquartered company, it’s very easy to assume everything’s happening in Silicon Valley. The good thing that we’re seeing now is significant investment going on around the globe, and from a Cisco point of view we announced about a month ago now an additional 100 million to an existing $150 million dollar investment arm that we have, looking at organizations around the globe that we’re looking to invest in, separate to the sport work that we do with the startups.
26:51 And we’ve made some investments here in the UK recently in that space. So, it’s for companies or for organizations of companies of companies. We’ve made some minor investments in organizations here in the UK, and that’s the way that we’ve always worked to be fair. We’ve always done that. We’ve worked with some of those organizations and made minor investments in them, you know, in a very supportive way.
27:15 And that again just gives us access to some really interesting ideas and critically people. San Jose, you were there a couple weeks ago. You set for a big meeting. It is an American company. You’re here in the UK.
27:27 We’re always talking about this on the show. Maybe too much. Do we talk about the Yanks too much? What’s your view? I mean, you’re obviously not American, but you work for an American company.
27:36 You go back there a lot. Is it when you go back to San Jose, is it do you have to get people’s attention like this is what we’re doing in London, or do innovative ideas come out of here? I think so. I think to start with that was probably the case. I think it was a bit of a struggle to get the UK recognized as something that was exciting.
27:55 But I would say that within the last 24 months that has changed from a Cisco perspective. We now see, you know, a lot of interest in a lot of the work that’s going on here. We also do a similar sort of program in Berlin, where we’re doing some work there in a similar fashion, similar model. But it worked, I would say it’s worked so successfully here and in Berlin that we’re now seeing set up about another six sites in a similar fashion pop up around the globe outside the US.
28:33 So, we’re definitely getting momentum, and I think again it’s recognition that, you know, the good ideas don’t just exist in that sort of small strip of Silicon Valley. There’s people out there with some great opportunities. And we want to sort of be working with them. What do you think that tipping point was 24 months ago? Well, for us, you know, here I think it was very much around London 2012, because we created a program specifically to do that.
29:02 Sure. And because we were sort of doing the sponsorship, because we had a lot of focus. I mean, it’s a global event, and so therefore we had global recognition, not just of Cisco, but also of our client base coming here and gave us a platform to demonstrate the breadth of talent that we had. And so, in fact, one of the final events that we had, at our hosting facility down, near the Olympic Park, was the big awards, British Innovation Gateway Awards. And so Jenny, who you talked about earlier on from Snap Fashion, she was one of the three winners, that we had.
29:40 Yeah, of course. We talked about that on the show. Yeah. Yeah. And so we were able to recognize her and Digital Shadows, who you also mentioned there.
29:48 We were able to recognize them in the Cisco house and, you know, all the attention that therefore had, I think suddenly, well, I won’t say suddenly, maybe I’m doing a disservice to my American colleagues. But we got the attention of people outside the UK, cuz I think we’ve always recognized that there’s talent here. You just have to look around, you know, where we are today to see that. But I think we’re also seeing a momentum with the likes of Tech City, and, you know, a lot of the government focus on London.
30:20 So I think there’s been a bit of a perfect storm. A number of elements have come together to help that. But certainly from a Cisco point of view, I would, you know, if you want to look for that genesis point, and then you’re probably looking back to the involvement in London 2012, and like you said, the government’s behind it. You were at Buckingham Palace this week so it’s nice to get the royalty behind it. Right.
30:40 I’m dropping for you. But I mean, there really is a big push these days, you know, from everyone in the government, and it helps tremendously. Well, absolutely, and I think, you know, whatever your political allegiances, there’s been you know, it’s been a challenge over the last couple of years in terms of recession and elements around that. And so one of the ways in which, you know, UK PLC, and this applies to every country to be honest, but certainly the UK PLC can start to drive growth and is doing something different, and that will come from the startups that we have, you know, here in London and around the country.
31:18 And I think the, if there is a challenge that we have in the UK, is making sure that it isn’t just London that gets the attention, cuz, you know, it’s very easy to do that. It’s, you know, it’s a big city on a global stage. But ideas exist around the UK, and certainly if we look at some of the programs that we do around the UK, we come across some great people out there, and it’s about making sure that they get visibility as well and don’t have to move here to do so.
31:48 Right. This, the most, one of the most expensive cities on the planet, as we can probably all attest to. It seems if you were putting money on innovation, you would put it anywhere around the world where it’s going to happen. You wouldn’t want to put all your eggs in the valley. You just want to put it into new ecosystems with ideas and then just see what springs up.
32:06 Whether that’s Berlin or London or Birmingham or maybe it doesn’t even have to be an urban environment these days. No, I, it can be, you know, we’re living in a connected world. It’s a virtual world. So I think the ability to find that talent to work with that talent anywhere exists so easily today. You know, we’ve had a few CTOs in here, like two.
32:26 But you’re, I know you’re the chief technology officer of a technology company, and I was just wondering how does that work? Because a lot of times the CTO’s we have in here, they’re the king of the castle. Like they, Tribe Sports is, you know, Tribe Sports and Sunkick and Sunkick. Yeah, those were the two CTOs. Yeah.
32:43 But, you know, you’re doing that in a tech, in a company that’s heavy technology. Yeah. So, how does that work? And is that different? Is that tricky?
32:50 It’s like being the CFO of Barclays. Like, I don’t know how, you know. Is that a good analogy? It’s a good analogy. Yeah, sure.
32:56 It’s a really good question. I quite often ask myself that. It’s really hard. Okay. But it’s really exciting.
33:03 You’re on top of your game always. Well, I’m not always, as my colleagues will no doubt testify, but it’s really hard. But it’s great fun. And it’s great fun not knowing as well. I know that may sound perverse, but the day that I sit back and think, “Yeah, I know everything.”
33:19 To be honest, that’s the day that I’ll probably stop. That’s never going to happen. And the ability, the capability to go out there and find something new every day. I mean, genuinely find something new, and have to learn, and be out of your comfort zone for me is what makes it so exciting. And I’m able to do that.
33:41 In a company where, to be honest, I’m given a fair degree of license to go out there and sort of find and speak to people and stuff, and so you mentioned, you know, the Buckingham Palace, thank you for doing that, but you going out there having those conversations, and then going, I mean, again, we’re doing a sponsoring, Bloodhound, which is the world land speed record, with Richard Noble, so I had a conversation with him today about how we’re doing in sponsorship, and you sometimes just have to think about, you know, the breadth and depth of the conversations you have, the sort of things you get involved in is very, very different to certainly what I thought I’d be doing when I first sort of came into technology. You know, I like technology, I like playing with technology, but it’s such a broad area, and I think that’s the thing that makes it so appealing.
34:31 You could end up doing pretty much anything within this space at the moment. What’s Berlin like when you think about what you guys are doing in Berlin versus London, is there a characteristic that’s happening over there as opposed to here. Is it more fintechy in London, or is it, I’m always curious. We haven’t been to Berlin. Yeah.
34:46 Well, to be fair, I haven’t been over there to see all the work, but clearly what we’re doing here is better than Berlin. Let’s just make that point. Well said. Yeah, let’s be clear on that point. Sorry.
34:55 But again there’s a lot of, from a Cisco point of view, they’re probably about 6 months behind us in terms of the maturity of the programs that they’ve got running, but again they’ve got some financial capability to work with those organizations and genuinely support them, genuinely support them, in terms of introductions, and in some cases it will be bringing them into Cisco and making them part of the broader organization but fundamentally it’s about just keeping the finger on the pulse of what’s happening. Do you see, or what do you see as our biggest potential roadblock in London when it comes to, say, 5 years out? I mean, do you see it being, you know, an immigration issue?
35:44 Do you think, you know, we don’t have these with these public markets, or what do you see as the one thing where we could mess things up? Well, yeah. So, this is another topic I’m really, really passionate about, which fits in very well here, is skills. You know, I genuinely have a concern that we don’t have the appropriate skills here. You see it firsthand, right?
36:06 Yeah. I mean, skills being engineers, like educational skills. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
36:11 So, technical skills. If you look at the marketplace at the moment and you very crude example, but if we’re hiring people, as we are at the moment actually, but if we’re hiring people, you know, we typically find, certainly I see, that we’re having to work harder to find the right people. Now, we’re still finding the right people, be clear on that, but we’re having to work harder to find those people. And we’re not unique. You know, if I speak to other organizations, competitors, you know, it’s the same challenge.
36:43 And I don’t know. And is it a supply issue? It is. I mean, that’s ultimately what it is. And I think if we look at where the market’s going, we touched on big data.
36:54 I think one of the big challenges will be around analytics and, you know, it’s all very well producing data, but unless you actually turn that into something useful, it’s no use at all. And the skills, the capabilities to do that, I’m just not sure are there in the depth that we need at the moment to really take advantage of where we’re going. That’s a lot of statistics and maths to really, yeah. And, you know, to a certain extent that’s been taken, I think, over the last couple of years, if not decades, to the financial services sector, you know, people with that capability and intelligence have gone into that market, and therefore there’s been a bit of a gap, a drain, in terms of the technology space.
37:40 I don’t know whether in light of some of the recent, you know, stories and general environment around the financial services sector, whether we’ll see people being put off going into that area and maybe revisiting tech as a result. I don’t know. But I think the big concern for me would be around the skills that we have coming through. And I do have to point out at this point I’m a governor of the UTC. There’s a UTC that’s just opened up around the corner from here, which is a university technical college, which you know, it sets out to try and address that skills gap at a very early age.
38:13 So it’s working with industry, such as ourselves, Cisco and BT and others, to set the curriculum for the schools drive the curriculum, and help educate the teachers in terms of where technology is going to inspire the students, that actually technology is a really exciting place to go. And so Hackney, just around the corner, which opened up about two years ago, is looking to do exactly that. So in the next couple of years, you know, to take advantage of all the businesses that are springing up in and around the area, hopefully we’ll have a pool of talent coming through that will be to go straight into those jobs.
38:50 But, you know, it’s just a tiny drop in an otherwise very big ocean that we need to address. What about talent from India or China or from the States? Is that something that we can’t live without here going forward? Well, I think, you know, clearly there’s an opportunity to bring talent over from there, but even there I think we’re sort of struggling with a number of different issues. You mentioned immigration, and there’s some very strong views on that.
39:16 Again, whether the skills are the right type of skills, language barriers, cultural barriers, you know, there’s a number of different elements that come into play. But yeah, I think the ability to utilize a lot of the talent, the raw talent that we have here in the UK is really important to do. We, again, we’re going somewhat off topic, but we started an apprentice program, oh cracky, about 3 years ago now, and that was a bit of a departure for us. We’d always had really strong graduate programs bringing people in, and we brought some apprentices in, and, you know, that where that talent is coming from is from a completely different area that we would have looked before.
39:57 One of our, you know, top performing apprentices trained as a hairdresser. I mean, if you’d got her CV initially, we wouldn’t have brought her in for an interview. But if you now look at how she’s developing and the skills that she’s got, you know, fantastic. So it’s about raw talent, right? No.
40:14 I know that makes sense. How much of your time do you spend looking at the 15 to 25 year olds in that young generation? I know you gave a talk in Jersey where you were talking about what’s important to a 15 to 25-year-old versus say 20 years ago, and he was talking about, like, when you were my age, a car was crucial. A car was your world. It was your independence.
40:33 It was your social scene. And these days it’s more like being connected. And I was just wondering how much you really look at that young demographic that will then in 10 years be a little bit older. Yeah. Well, you know, purely from a professional capacity, of course, but yeah, I look at that area from a, you know, real keen interest in the sense that, you know, first of all, from a talent point of view, in terms of future skills coming into my business in terms of perspective customers going forward, but also from the point of view in terms of some of the ideas that they’ve got, some of the way in which they work, and to your point, the way in which they use technology and how important they relate to technology.
41:14 You know, this is really good way of looking into the future of how we’re going to work. I heard someone mention the other day, again sort of going back to the sharing of data and stuff. Someone saying, “Aren’t you a bit scared of putting your pictures of your Saturday night out onto Facebook or whatever?” And the answer was, “Well, no, not really, cuz the person that’s going to be interviewing me in 10 years time will done exactly the same.” You know, it is a change of mindset.
41:40 It’s a change of culture that we’ve got to accept. There’s no more perfect life. Do you know what I mean? Every. Well, that is the new perfect life.
41:47 I think that’s the way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Is that everyone has the information out there? So, I’d hate to be a politician in like 20 years.
41:54 It’s like, it’s interesting. But then also, you can just own it. I mean, Barack Obama wrote a book before he ran for president that openly talked about his cocaine use, and it was fine. Of course, someone else told me on the show, they said, “Yeah, but was there an iPhone video of him doing it?” Okay, maybe not.
42:09 But there are ways of kind of owning it and knowing. I mean, you would never think that a president would be able to do that but he did. So I don’t know, it’s interesting where we’re going. Ian, we always ask a few personal questions at the end. I’m going to hit you with them.
42:21 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ian and give that young man a bit of advice. I’m very curious. What would you tell him to do? Yeah, really good question. Probably study a bit harder.
42:33 Were you a tech guy? Well, I went to university but I went the long way about it. I had to do an extra year at school, and to be honest, I wish I hadn’t. Cuz I could have been probably a year, two years, ahead of myself, sort of thing. But anyway, so probably study a bit more, I think, would be one thing.
42:53 Probably make an investment into Cisco 20 years ago would have been a nice thing to have done. But, I don’t know. It’s a really good question. Really good question. Would you have jumped in on online quicker?
43:09 Would you have gone the internet way or the coding way quicker by any means? Yeah, I know. So, just, I mean, I had an opportunity actually. That’s the, so, joking aside about Cisco, I had an opportunity to join Cisco probably about 2 years earlier than I actually joined. And at the time it was a relatively small company.
43:30 And if I was making that phone call now, I would say when you get that call, when you get that opportunity, just go for it. Don’t worry. Because I was at Nortel at the time. So, a big, you know, established company. Great time.
43:44 I really enjoyed it. And that was probably the thing that kept me there. I was enjoying it so much. So when this small company came along and I had the opportunity to join it was, well, I don’t really know them, you know, played around with a bit of the kit, but, you know, I’m working at Nortel. It’s a big company.
44:02 So that’s probably the bit of advice I’d whisper into my ear. Did Nortel go bankrupt? They did. Yeah. My pension.
44:08 I remember calling, they’re still selling those patents. One of my really good friends in Toronto is a lawyer and he’s been working that case for 5 10 years selling their patents. Yep. I was broke in the credit derivatives when they were going bust. So, it was a fun market.
44:22 Made a little bit of money off Nortel. The second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received, actually, while you’re at Cisco. What’s the best advice you’ve received? So, well, that, for me, is just consistently push yourself outside your boundaries. I mean, it’s again a really obvious thing, but I think it’s sometimes easy just to, again, accept what you know and try and become the kingpin, you know, the big person around that particular topic.
44:48 And for me, I was always told just constantly push yourself and walk into the unknown. And for me, that’s what I do on a regular basis. Sometimes I fail. You know, let’s be clear, it happens to everyone, but for me, I enjoy it. I enjoy putting myself out there and not quite knowing what I’m going to expect or do next.
45:08 And it’s been fun. Is that a culture at Cisco? Because they were a startup. They came out of Stanford more so than it would be a culture at a big old school telecom. Maybe.
45:16 Maybe. Yeah, I mean, I certainly see it around in some of my colleagues. Absolutely. And in fact, one of the reasons that we actually got involved in working with some of the startups. Another reason was to try and drive that mindset into us as an organization, cuz, to your point, as a big organization, it’s quite easy just to sort of plot along and do what you do.
45:40 But working with some of the organizations that we do, it’s such a creative environment, and being able to instill some of that mindset and that thinking into our staff is, you know, a huge bonus for us. And so, we actually mentor and arguably it’s a reverse mentorship. We have people pair up between some of the startups that we work with and some of the established people that we have within the business. And it’s about sharing best practice and mind share and, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
46:09 And it really rubs off on them. It really rubs off on them in terms of some of the ideas that they’re going to come back with, and the different ways in which they approach challenges. So, it’s, you know, it’s a good way of working. We find anyway that’s such an important part culturally for a big company, I think, cuz a lot of big companies that you don’t get that, people don’t step outside of the box and do something new and take a risk, cuz they’re terrified of failure.
46:30 And if they just don’t screw up, then they got a pretty nice job security, all that sort of stuff. sele and be uncomfortable and try new things to grow and innovate, is something I haven’t heard from a big company before. Yeah. Yeah. It’s something that, and again, you know, this is something that’s come from recently.
46:55 It’s come from the top. You know, we will hear John Chambers, our chairman CEO, talk about, you know, we haven’t taken enough risk in the past, you know, we need to take more risk, and that’s really refreshing to hear because if you’re going to grow, if you’re going to be successful, you need to take risk. I’d say it’s 99% almost impossible not to get into that non-innovator’s dilemma. I mean, all of your structure, all of your vested equity, all of your promotions are based on being ultimately somewhat conservative.
47:24 So, it seems like you really have to stick to your guns, you know, and get your chairman to say things like that to make sure you’re taking those risks. You know, you mentor lots of people and you have, you know, this IoT challenge coming up. You’ve got IDA London. What advice would you give to the 20-year-old out there from anywhere in the world that that you know, ultimately would want, you know, to get the advice or become part of, you know, the Cisco family?
47:45 What would you tell them to do first? Well, yeah, good question. So we get a lot of ideas thrown at us. A lot of organizations come to us. But they’re not always fully thought through.
48:00 I mean, it might be a good bit of tech, but, you know, what exactly is it trying to address? What’s the outcome that it’s trying to drive or fix? And it’s getting that whole view that we, I think, quite often don’t see when we talk to some organizations that come to us. The idea isn’t fully thought through. I met an organization only this week actually who I won’t go into the detail of what they were doing for their benefit, but they were producing a technology and they were very much looking at it from, you know, selling an end device to a user, and I was saying, well, it’s interesting, but what’s your annuity model, where does that play in?
48:49 And it was, well, what’s the what’s an annuity model? And it, okay. Well, it’s essentially cloud. It’s, you know, that’s the way the market is going. And it was just a real surprise to even hear that someone hadn’t even thought about that, and just almost thinking about it in terms of selling units, and that was it.
49:07 Move on to the next one and sell again and sell again. And the market in which they’re operating in, you know, that’s long since gone. It’s very much cloud-based as a service type offering. So, it’s a real surprise. So there’s examples there.
49:21 But I think for us it is about, you know, we go along to a lot of events you know, the Silicon Drinkabout and stuff like that goes on around here, and it’s great to meet people but we meet a lot of people, and if you’re going to pitch your idea in that type of environment, and that’s great to do, believe me, it’s great to do, but make sure it’s clear, concise, and to the point, in the amount of times you sort of lose interest after a, you know, 40 minutes of still trying to work out what it is the person’s trying to actually tell you is hard work. Good advice. We’ve heard that before.
49:59 Make something people want, or so, make something that there’s a market for. Don’t just have it because it’s this cool idea you thought of, or make a piece of hardware that’s going to be obso. But the amount of times people just don’t do that, or they think they’ve done it and yet still go on for half an hour about their idea. And you know, you’ve got to be able to get your idea across really quickly. And that doesn’t change whether you’re a one person startup company through to a multinational global organization going to talk to another multinational global organization.
50:31 We might have a big, you know, a name, a brand that we can leverage, but we still don’t get half an hour, 40 minutes, to talk through an interesting idea with someone. We’ve got to get it across. Deliver it quickly and to the point. Yeah. To get your pitch down.
50:46 I had a guy on London Real this week, has a book called Pitch Anything, and he’s all about get that one minute pitch. Don’t wing it and make sure it really wows people and get past, he calls it the crocodile brain. So get past people being like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it.” And show them something that’s new and sexy and innovative and be like, “Okay, wow. Now you’re not wasting my time.”
51:05 And on that point, never for me, I have a little bug there. Never use another established organization, say it’s like so and so. Well, if it’s like then I’ll just go and do that. It, to me, sort of demeans what their value proposition is. You know, I always, and that’s just a personal thing, but I find it odd when people say, “Well, it’s like this or it’s like that.”
51:28 Well, why wouldn’t I just do that then? That’s good feedback. The other thing I’m just, last thing, I’m guessing you hear a lot of ideas, but people don’t put money in ideas. They put money behind people that can execute those ideas. So, you must hear all these ideas all the time, but it’s like, are you the guy that’s going to make it happen?
51:43 Is how you ultimately invest. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the people that we’ve met, I mean, we’ve met some amazing people, absolutely amazing people over the last couple of years. And, you know, there, sometimes their ideas don’t work, but because of their mindset, because of that culture that they’ve got, they’ll go and do another one. They’ll try another one.
52:02 They’ll try another one. And the reverse of that, you’ll get some great ideas, but to be honest, the people just aren’t capable of delivering it or don’t stand up to the idea appropriately. So yeah, fundamentally, and you know, we work with and speak to a lot of VCs and angels and stuff like that. And it’s always, you know, nothing new. It’s always the people that they’re investing in.
52:28 It’s not the idea. He just quoted our tagline. It’s about the people. And that’s why we’re doing this, because, you know, when Colin came to me a year ago, this is episode 50, and suggested we do this show. The tagline came out, it’s about the people.
52:40 And I mean, I was just thinking of Jenny Griffith. You spend 45 minutes talking to Jenny and you’re like, “Okay, you’re basically investing in Jenny, and like the idea is great and important, but it’s secondary.” Absolutely. And so, it’s really well said. Look, it’s all about.
52:54 It’s almost been set up and it wasn’t. That was the thing. So on that, I just want to touch on one more thing because I think Elon Musk did something pretty cool yesterday where he released all of his patents for Tesla to the open market, and it’s about the people. It’s about, you know, him innovating, continuing to innovate further, that, you know, he wants people to use his patents rather than hold them together. I was curious, maybe, because I’m sure Cisco has a boatload of patents stacked away.
53:18 What are your thoughts on that? And is it a game changer or not? Really? It’s an interesting approach. Definitely an interesting approach.
53:25 I mean, what we do, and in fact we haven’t gone quite that far, but one of the things that we recently relaunched, and we’re much more, I guess, supportive, open around it, is something called DevNet program that we have, and that is all about allowing access to our platforms, to our hardware, software, through APIs and supporting people in doing that, and I think historically we’ve been a little bit standoffish on that, or we’ve we’ve sort of made a document available that people can look at, but it’s a static document, and there’s no one to go to if you got questions or queries. So we’ve really begun to push, and support, organizations that are doing that. So that we can, again, start to more effectively work with them, bring the value of Cisco to organizations through that integration with their software, their development.
54:20 So I don’t think we’ll, to be fair, ever go as far as Tesla have gone. But I think we’re certainly seeing a mindset shift in the way in which we do present ourselves and open ourselves up to organizations out there. It’s kind of like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates giving away 90% of their wealth, and they’re like, look, I did it. Why don’t you do it? Billionaire, billionaire, billionaire X.
54:43 So it’s a great and interesting trend to see where this goes. We’re out of time. Ian, thanks so much for being here. I love what you guys are doing in the UK with all these different efforts, and it’s nice to have a big company like you that is kind of putting that investment back. So thanks for coming on.
54:59 You’re on Twitter. You’re pretty active on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. On Ian, if I, okay.
55:03 At you guys are hiring. How, if someone out there wants to work for Cisco, what do they do? Well, just look on. Yeah. Look on the website.
55:11 The jobs are on there. We’re looking across a number of different areas. Traditional networking space. In fact, right the way through to software development skills, we’re looking for quite heavily now, to bring that skill set in. So yeah, it’s a broad set of technical skills we’re looking for now.
55:26 Good. And I think you have a Cisco at Cisco UKI, I think is your Twitter here, and then obviously Ideal London as well is on there as well, and create. So we’ve got a number of different innovation spaces that people can follow and get news on what we’re doing cuz it’s exciting time. Excellent. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, we’re on YouTube, come see our beautiful faces.
55:46 Shout out to my favorite Cisco employee, my brother Eric in Switzerland. Good call on that company. As Ian says, it’s about the people. It’s almost our year anniversary. What did you get me into, Colin?
55:58 I don’t know. It’s been lots of fun. I’m sorry. It’s all good. We got tons of great guests coming up.
56:02 Lots of other exciting things happening. So, thanks so much, guys, for being here. Really appreciate it. And all the best.
