Cisco: Businesses will adopt YouTube model

Video sharing site YouTube may have a more profound effect on commerce than just boosting sales of Diet Coke and Mentos. Business will soon come to see user generated content as an unavoidable part of everyday business, according to Cisco CEO John Chambers.

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

He told delegates at ITU Telecom World in Hong Kong today: "That's our children - wait 'til we get hold of it. 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, the Cisco boss believes, where healthcare information could be distributed to those in areas where medical facilities are not so common.

He said: "Now we're beginning to provide healthcare to remote villages in China and India - that will change society."

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

He said: "We haven't seen anything yet." By 2015, Chambers believes that 15 exabytes a month will be travelling across assorted pipes the world over.

Chambers added: "That could be wrong, it could turn out to be conservative."