Chambers: Businesses to adopt YouTube model

HONG KONG--Video-sharing site YouTube may have a more profound effect on commerce than just boosting sales of Diet Coke and Mentos.

Businesses will soon come to see user-generated content as an unavoidable part of everyday business, according to Cisco Systems Chief Executive John Chambers.

Already, 25 million videos are being downloaded from YouTube every day. But that could turn out to be peanuts, compared with what user-generated content can really do, Chambers said.

John Chambers

"That's our children--wait till we get hold of it," Chambers told delegates at the ITU Telecom World conference here Monday. "We will change business models on this. In the future, it will be about producing it yourself" as enterprises start to adopt technologies such as collaboration tools.

User interaction and content sharing could be put to use particularly effectively with telemedicine, where health care information could be distributed to those in areas where medical facilities are not so common, Chambers said.

"Now we're beginning to provide health care to remote villages in China and India--that will change society," he said.

As a result of a trend toward content sharing from businesses and consumers alike, network traffic will obviously reach new highs, Chambers predicted.

"We haven't seen anything yet," he said. By 2015, the Cisco chief believes that 15 exabytes a month will be traveling through assorted pipes across the world. (An exabyte is a billion gigabytes.)

"That could be wrong," he added. "It could turn out to be conservative."

Jo Best of Silicon.com reported from Hong Kong.