Distancing itself from consumer business, Cisco is planning to shore up its sagging fortunes by narrowing its priorities into its five key areas. Delivering the keynote address at the Cisco Live event today in Las Vegas, which has attracted 15,000 people, the company CEO John Chambers laid out plans to make Cisco an easy company to do business with. Admitting that it’s time to radically change again to keep pace with the fast changing business environment, Chambers said his aim is to transform Cisco into a leaner, stronger and more focused organisation.
“The role of network is going to change dramatically over the next few years and you will have to use the network to achieve your business goals. Intelligent networks will become the most critical asset,” said Chambers during his keynote.
As part of the new strategy, Cisco’s top 5 priorities include a renewed focus on routing and switching, an area where the networking giant is facing intense competition. “We will maintain our leadership in the core, including routing, switching and services that span mobility and security,” said Chambers.
Other priorities include collaboration, data centre, virtualisation and cloud, video and architectural approach to business transformation. Cisco is betting big on video with Chambers saying it will be the primary form of communication. “Video will be the next voice. We estimate that by 2014, 91 percent of Internet traffic will be video,” he said.
To improve agility and speed up decision-making process, Cisco is also reducing the number of internal business groups. “ We will have one core technology group focused on strategy and one integrated group focused on operation systems. We are going to streamline engineering and simplify internal structures. Cisco will be a company that will lead the future of networking and our commitment to you is innovation,” said Chambers.
