Chambers Promises a Simpler Cisco
LAS VEGAS -- Cisco Live 2011 -- After his Tuesday keynote, Cisco CEO John Chambers said he's making a mental note to not miss the next big transition in his business.
His talk had included a slide showing Cisco's major transition points so far. In 2001, at age 15, Cisco survived the dot-com bust by expanding beyond switching and routing. Now, 10 years later, Cisco is at another major transition point -- one Chambers said the company will fix by making decisions faster and becoming less bureaucratic.
"Speed of decisions is the number-one thing I want to see improved at Cisco," he'd said during the keynote.
His slide showed the next phase lasting only five years. While a small group of audience members hung out with Chambers after the keynote, Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group Research Inc. , asked about that time frame, and Chambers responded that he expects the next major transition to come that quickly.
He added that he intends to do a checkup on the business at around year four, to make sure he isn't caught by surprise again.
The simpler Cisco
Cisco isn't expected to detail its restructuring until after its fiscal year ends on July 31. So, Chambers didn't talk at all about the staff cuts that have been all the rage in the press. (See Report: Cisco Cuts Could Hit 10,000, Cisco May Cut 5,000 Jobs and Cisco's Early Retirements Begin.)
But he did give Cisco's customers an overview of how the company's management is changing, the goal being to create a faster organization that's easier to do business with.
Because Cisco Live is a customer event, Chambers emphasized that more sales decisions will be made closer to the customer level, rather than by faraway executives.
In the post-keynote hanging-out session, Chambers added the boards-and-councils structure hadn't necessarily outlived its usefulness but had become too bureaucratic. The number of boards and councils has already been reduced to three -- enterprise, service provider and emerging markets. (See Cisco Cuts Down on Councils.)
"The guys that run those boards will be held to greater accountability than in the old model," Kerravala told Light Reading.
Cisco is also merging some product groups, because the siloed approach that served it well in the 2000s has become too clunky, Chambers said. Too many groups emerged -- software had three major ones plus assorted skunkworks around the company. Software is being melded into one group, and something similar is happening to Cisco's other major businesses.
Table 1: Integrating Cisco
Chambers also mentioned in his keynote that the company will integrate new technologies more quickly. Kerravala translates that to mean Cisco has to make "fewer acquisitions or bigger ones" -- probably the latter.
One topic Chambers didn't discuss was market adjacencies -- the technologies peripherally related to Cisco's business. "That to me is their biggest challenge," Kerravala says. "Last year they were talking about 30 adjacencies. I think they might streamline that down to 10."
Adjancencies are maligned nowadays, partly because no one could figure out why Cisco wanted to own the Flip camera. But they helped Cisco dig out of the dot-com crash. Five of the six advanced technologies, as Cisco called them back then, became $1 billion businesses for Cisco, Chambers said. Those include security and wireless LAN. (The sixth technology is probably optical networking.)
Kerravala thinks Cisco has to keep looking outside its normal boundaries for growth. "Enterprise drives the ship, and there aren't that many large areas of spend lift in enterprise that have the margins Cisco wants and that they don't dominate," Kerravala said.
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading
His talk had included a slide showing Cisco's major transition points so far. In 2001, at age 15, Cisco survived the dot-com bust by expanding beyond switching and routing. Now, 10 years later, Cisco is at another major transition point -- one Chambers said the company will fix by making decisions faster and becoming less bureaucratic.
"Speed of decisions is the number-one thing I want to see improved at Cisco," he'd said during the keynote.
His slide showed the next phase lasting only five years. While a small group of audience members hung out with Chambers after the keynote, Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group Research Inc. , asked about that time frame, and Chambers responded that he expects the next major transition to come that quickly.
He added that he intends to do a checkup on the business at around year four, to make sure he isn't caught by surprise again.
The simpler Cisco
Cisco isn't expected to detail its restructuring until after its fiscal year ends on July 31. So, Chambers didn't talk at all about the staff cuts that have been all the rage in the press. (See Report: Cisco Cuts Could Hit 10,000, Cisco May Cut 5,000 Jobs and Cisco's Early Retirements Begin.)
But he did give Cisco's customers an overview of how the company's management is changing, the goal being to create a faster organization that's easier to do business with.
Because Cisco Live is a customer event, Chambers emphasized that more sales decisions will be made closer to the customer level, rather than by faraway executives.
In the post-keynote hanging-out session, Chambers added the boards-and-councils structure hadn't necessarily outlived its usefulness but had become too bureaucratic. The number of boards and councils has already been reduced to three -- enterprise, service provider and emerging markets. (See Cisco Cuts Down on Councils.)
"The guys that run those boards will be held to greater accountability than in the old model," Kerravala told Light Reading.
Cisco is also merging some product groups, because the siloed approach that served it well in the 2000s has become too clunky, Chambers said. Too many groups emerged -- software had three major ones plus assorted skunkworks around the company. Software is being melded into one group, and something similar is happening to Cisco's other major businesses.
Table 1: Integrating Cisco
| These pieces... | ... Are getting combined into: |
| Various software groups | OS group |
| Switching / Routing / Optical | Core technology group |
| Voice / Social media / WebEx | Communications and Collaboration team |
| Cable and set-top stuff | Service provider group |
Chambers also mentioned in his keynote that the company will integrate new technologies more quickly. Kerravala translates that to mean Cisco has to make "fewer acquisitions or bigger ones" -- probably the latter.
One topic Chambers didn't discuss was market adjacencies -- the technologies peripherally related to Cisco's business. "That to me is their biggest challenge," Kerravala says. "Last year they were talking about 30 adjacencies. I think they might streamline that down to 10."
Adjancencies are maligned nowadays, partly because no one could figure out why Cisco wanted to own the Flip camera. But they helped Cisco dig out of the dot-com crash. Five of the six advanced technologies, as Cisco called them back then, became $1 billion businesses for Cisco, Chambers said. Those include security and wireless LAN. (The sixth technology is probably optical networking.)
Kerravala thinks Cisco has to keep looking outside its normal boundaries for growth. "Enterprise drives the ship, and there aren't that many large areas of spend lift in enterprise that have the margins Cisco wants and that they don't dominate," Kerravala said.
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading
