Companies need to increase the agility of their data centres to meet business demands, Cisco chief executive John Chambers argued in a keynote at the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco.

Collaboration is the latest trend, according to Chambers, allowing firms to make decisions much more quickly. Cisco touted tools ranging from Wikis to its telepresence conferencing technology as ways to increase collaboration.

But to truly allow collaboration, IT organisations must provide access to all information regardless of the system on which it is stored.

"You have to break through silos," Chambers said. "It is not just about technology. It is about working in groups."

Cisco is referring to the collaboration market as Data Centre 3.0. The first version was dominated by mainframes, and the second generation comprises the current client-server model.

The networking giant unveiled its Data Centre 3.0 vision earlier this year at the Networkers at Cisco Live conference in Anaheim, California.

The initiative is similar to programmes such as HP's Utility Data Centre, IBM's autonomic computing technology or Sun Microsystems' N1, all of which promise centrally managed server pools where compute power is assigned dynamically.

Data Centre 3.0 spans existing Cisco services and products such as security and storage area networks, as well as new products such as the VFrame Data Center.

The technology allows IT staff automatically to provision new servers to meet growing demands.

Cisco unveiled an expansion of the VFrame Data Center at VMworld that allows the provisioning and roll-out of new servers.