Geoff Lawrie, formerly MD of Microsoft New Zealand, has been with Cisco for four months now, but he says the future is clear before him.
"We're undergoing a sea change at the moment here in the ICT industry."
Lawrie says the industry as a whole is moving from worrying about capacity and capability of its ICT infrastructure, something that dominated the last decade, towards a much more fundamentally important issue: what can we do with it?
"Issues like mobility and wireless are blurring the lines between work and leisure. It used to be clear cut - you go to work and then you go home. Now you can take work with you anywhere you go and that creates its own challenges." Lawrie says from a technical perspective that puts the emphasis back on the datacentre as the focal point.
Cisco is talking up unified messaging as the way of the future and Lawrie says as more companies move to an all-IP network, to take advantage of the new regulatory environment in telecommunications, he expects unified messaging solutions to be at the forefront of IT managers' minds.