During the company’s Annual General Meeting held Wednesday, CEO John Chambers outlined Cisco’s strategy for the road ahead. It’s a strategy that emphasizes innovation and business enablement as opposed to just the network plumbing of switches and routers. Chambers also stressed that Cisco will aggressively compete against rival networking vendors including Juniper, HP and Huawei.
Chambers noted that the biggest market transition today is moving from Information Technology that was done in the back room with routing and switching to a business technology approach. He said that Cisco is continuing to evolve from being just a technology provider to being a technology partner with customers.
Part of that evolution involves the move to the cloud.
“There has never been a more network centric technology architecture than the cloud,” Chambers said.
Overall, Chambers stressed that the technologies that Cisco builds can help make the world a better place.
“I think that the Internet and Cisco as one of its key leaders, can change the standard of living around the world and human rights for everyone in a way that doesn’t occur otherwise,” Chambers said.
In the final analysis though, Cisco is in business to make money, which is a message that he strongly reiterated to his company’s shareholders.
“My commitment to you is that we’re going to move heaven and earth to maximize return for our shareholders,” Chambers said. “We are completely committed as that is our number one goal.”
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Cisco CEO Pledges to Accelerate Change
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.