Cisco kicked off its 25th annual customer show with the theme of “Tomorrow Starts Here” and a big emphasis on two initiatives: the Internet of Everything and its new Application Centric Infrastructure.
In a keynote address in San Francisco to a registered crowd of 25,000 + 200,000 online viewers, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers began by saying that he expects the next few years will bring “a brutal consolidation to the networking industry. ”
Cisco has a goal of becoming the world’s leading IT vendor and Chambers predicts that many of its competitors today will be out of business by 2018. He vowed that Cisco will lead the transformation to software-defined networks in part because it stands alone in the industry with a clearly differentiated, end-to-end network architecture based on driving application performance.
Chambers said that Cisco’s decision to pursue custom ASICS to deliver programmable policy control will give it a permanent price/performance advantage in SDN. Likewise with the nascent market for the Internet of Everything, Chambers said “no one will eat our lunch”.
An archive of the presentation in online.
