As it works through its restructuring, Cisco is determined to remain a customer-driven company said John Chambers, speaking at the Cisco Live! event in Las Vegas.
The restructuring primarily aims to simplify the company’s operations, refocus on core areas of network switching, routing and collaboration, and to speed-up decision making. Multiple groups inside the company are being integrated by network architecture. The sales organization is being flattened to bring decision making closer to the customer.
Enterprise collaboration was the focus of this year’s Cisco Live! keynote, tying multiple forms of collaboration from chat, to Webex to full telepresence into unified enterprise applications. Chambers predicted that video traffic will grow from 50% of enterprise traffic today to over 90% in 2014 as video becomes the primary way that businesses collaborate. This will coincide with four megatrends: mobile, social, visual and virtual.
Cisco Chief Demonstration Officer, Jim Grubb, showed a networked collaboration scenario for the oil & gas industry. This included a video-enabled robot streaming footage from inside a gas pipeline to technicians equipped with Cius tablets.
Cisco Live! noted record attendance both in-person and virtually. http://www.ciscolive.com http://www.cisco.com
- On 11-May-2011, Cisco announced a reorganization aimed at simplifying its organization and reduce costs by $1 billion in its FY ’12 expense run rate. This is likely to include job cuts, although the number was not specified. Cisco also announced its intention to divest or exit underperforming operations, including the Flip consumer camera division which was dropped last month. The company will also start issuing quarterly dividends. At the time, Chambers said Q4 is likely to continue to show weakness as the company works through these various issues. The company expects Q4 revenue growth to be in the range of flat to up 2% on a year-over-year basis.