Cisco Chief Futurist: An Interview

Chief technologist for Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, Dave Evans, says unified communications is an entry point into a much, much broader conversation about the future of technology.

Anyone can hold a finger up in the air and guess which way the wind will blow, but few people get paid for the job and fewer yet can intuit the forces driving those wind’s and the breeze’s destination many miles away. Our series of articles on unified communications led us to Cisco, and those inquiries led us to a unique conversation with the company’s chief futurist, Dave Evans, who is also the chief technologist for Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).

Evans has 38 persistent interconnections from his own devices and runs them off of a 50 Mbps personal Internet connection. He expects this bandwidth to increase by 3 million times over the next decade.

His future thinking wanders from automobile interfaces to the blending of human and machine into a new species. (Evans is on the board at Singularity University, located at the NASA Research Park campus.) For Evans, unified communications are only an entry point into a much, much broader conversation.

Tom’s IT Pro: First off, I’m intrigued by your job. Cisco is known for being something of a conservative outfit. How does one become a futurist at Cisco?

Dave Evans: My background is IT, Computer Science, and Computer Engineering. I’ve sort of been in that field for the last 25 to 30 years, of which 21 have been at Cisco. I have a long history at Cisco of doing a lot of innovative firsts, like setting up our first Web server. I’ve always been one that’s been well grounded in technology but always with an eye towards where the world’s going and what’s coming next. So Cisco created this role for me about four or five years ago, and it’s been very successful. Especially right now, when there’s maybe a perceived lack of innovation in the industry and we’re in a bit of a recession, there’s a huge demand for knowing what’s next. Where do we place our bets? What’s the next best thing? Where’s technology going? That type of thing.

I found the role to be very well received. There’s certainly no shortage of opportunities to go speak to customers at events and talk about where the world’s going. Now, in my role as CTO for the Internet Business Solutions Group, which is Cisco’s strategic consultancy, I spend a lot of time being more of an outwardly-facing futurist. In other words, I spend a lot of time with Cisco customers helping them to understand where the world is going. There’s less about internal direction and internal product influence, although I do do that. Anyway, that’s the minimized aspect of my role, but it’s very externally facing across all industry verticals and technology domains. So although I work for Cisco and have a huge passion for networking technology, you’ll find that I also look at displays, consumer tech, robotics, quantum computing—things like that. I have a pretty broad purview, but at the end of the day, it all comes back to the network. The network is the unifying force that brings it all together and allows us to do things that would otherwise be impossible.

TIP: How far out do you attempt to look when guiding people?

DE: Well, with customers I tend to keep it more near-term, like the next set of three to five years. I’ve found that as you start going much past that, it becomes too subjective and less relevant. Companies tend to make their business plans for the next two to three years, so I keep it more grounded. However, I have a presentation I’m doing lately called 10 and 10. It’s ten technology trends over the next ten years, and I’ve found that that’s actually a fairly good horizon to get people thinking about. I can go out as far as fifty to one-hundred years in some areas, although that’s incredibly speculative and not based on a lot of hard science. So I try to keep it within this ten-year horizon or, for customer engagements, the next two to five.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, storage solutions and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction. See here for all of William's Tom's IT Pro articles.