As a key video collaboration tool, Webex was never set up to connect the entire world all at once.

Yet, along with other video communications platforms, Cisco Systems Inc. is dealing with unprecedented usage volume for its collaboration solution as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The service racked up 5.5 billion meeting minutes during the first 11 days of March alone, according to Cisco chief executive officer Chuck Robbins, who acknowledged that Webex was experiencing four to fives times the volume it was built to handle a month ago.

“Now we’re seeing corporate networks getting crushed, the cloud providers are getting crushed,” said Zeus Kerravala (pictured), founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. “Some of the video conferencing companies are having to double or triple capacity. We would have seen this eventually with all of the data coming in and all of the new devices being connected, but what COVID did is just accelerate everything everywhere so that it’s exposed all at once.”

Kerravala spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how enterprises will need to focus more heavily on network technologies in coming months and lessons learned from the effect of the coronavirus on company operations.

Network is the business

Cisco’s experience and that of other large enterprises has provided a virus-driven wake-up call regarding the network’s role. A single application from a person’s home to the cloud and back to the company is what ultimately drives the user experience, and it takes a robust network to make that journey successful.

“If you look at the building blocks of digital — internet of things, mobility, cloud — the writing has been on the wall for a while,” Kerravala said. “Most digital organizations now have to come to the realization that they’re network-centric. The network is the business, and that’s not something that a lot of companies have put a lot of focus on.”

They will now. Even before the full impact of the coronavirus on the business world would be felt, the largest Federal Communications Commission auction in history last month saw major telecommunications players, such as Verizon Inc., T-Mobile USA Inc. and AT&T Inc., snap up spectrum in anticipation of the build out necessary for 5G wireless networks.

“The world is shifting,” Kerravala said. “Applications and people are becoming network-centric, and if those don’t work, nothing works. That’s really been proven over the last couple of months.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE