This week, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he expects Web 2.0 to drive the company's revenue and to contribute to significant growth--rekindling the type of surge that Cisco experienced during the heyday of the Internet and telecom spike at the end of the 1990s. How exactly is Cisco defining "Web 2.0"? It's lumping collaboration and hosted apps together, along with a number of alternatives to more traditional IT enterprise offerings. After his earnings report this year, Chambers said that Cisco raised its forecast for average revenue growth each quarter to between 12 and 17 percent; over the past three years, growth hovered at a solid 10 and 15 percent year-over-year in each quarter. No doubt, some of this newfound Web 2.0 focus is due to Cisco's recent acquisition of web conferencing company WebEX. "This truly is the top of the first inning of a nine-inning game," Chambers said.

Not long after his talk, in a very strange set of developments, Cisco lost power at its data center and Cisco.com--the main corporate website--was down for three hours. How did the company deliver the news? In very Web 2.0 form, the communication was made over its official blog.

For more on these developments:
- check out the article in InfoWorld
- read this article in ComputerWorld