IP Telephony solutions provider Cisco CEO speaks his mind

If you use IP Telephony products and infrastructure in your enterprise, odds are pretty good you rely on Cisco solutions.

And when it comes to the solutions they offer you, companies like Cisco are only as fertile as the brains of their researchers.

But when he gets to the subject of where that brainpower will be coming from, Cisco CEO John Chambers is not exactly upbeat. In terms of numbers, he sees more talent coming out of China and India than the U.S.

"They're very focused in those countries. You have a billion people in India, a billion people in China," Chambers tells Network Computing magazine. "They're going to put their top 10 percent into the universities. Twenty-five percent of those will be in the computer sciences, math, etc., so it's purely a matter of numbers. And if you have the numbers they're putting into that, at a time when the United States and Europe are getting less and less--you're talking, what, 48,000 master's degrees is all we're doing a year in computer science, math and science? That's a rounding error. The Chinese will have within a decade 10 times that, and so will the Indians. I think a lot of countries in Asia are realizing that high tech is an industry they want to play in."

To make things right, Chambers says that "we have to get our education act back together- we've got to focus on K thru 12 as well as the universities."

Dang is he right. At the same time high school students in India and China are studying hard to attain degrees in the computer sciences, too many of our students are being held back by schools that are starving for support, and school boards that question the basic tenets of science.

Do you agree with John Chambers? Post a TalkBack.