I invite you all to join to learn about our strategic direction for the MDS 9000 product line.

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Five years ago, Cisco committed to the Data Center in a strong fashion with our entry into Storage networking and MDS products. Today our Data Center engineering and management team is broader and deeper than ever as we have established a significant footprint across our portfolio growing to be the #1 or #2 company in each data center segment. Together our teams have generated 1500 patents and developed a transformational strategy with Data Center 3.0 across the past three years. We have pioneered new products such as VFrame, Nexus 5000/7000, a new class of NX-OS software, Catalyst 49XX & Catalyst 6500 VSS, ACE and WAAS; enabled new forms of virtualization and datacenter security, forged key industry partnerships and completed several acquisitions. Just last week, our innovations were awarded best of show at Interop for Nexus 7000 and WAAS. We also surpassed a cumulative of one million 10 gigabit ethernet ports across switches and routers, a key milestone of 10GE adoption in the Data Center.

I came to Cisco through our first acquisition, Crescendo Communications, in 1993. At the time, Cisco was less than $1B in revenue, around 1000 employees and mainly a router company. Today we are a nearly $40B networking company with formidable presence in the Enterprise Campus, Datacenters, Branch, Service Provider, Commercial and Consumer markets.

With mixed feelings and much introspection I have come to my decision to leave Cisco after 15 great and memorable years. My loyalty and affection to Cisco, CEO John Chambers and my teams made this a very difficult and lengthy decision process.

However, I am confident that I am passing the baton to some of the best engineering talent and general managers in the industry who will continue this journey we have begun. And I expect that Cisco will continue to innovate, capture growth opportunities and market share to meet our customers’ needs for Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision. It has been my privilege to lead this team and I have full faith in our future driving Cisco's vision for transforming the data center. As for the inevitable question of what I plan to do next, I hope to re-kindle passions for my “next new gig” this summer and make an informed decision later this year.

Then there are the Fibre Channel proponents who believe no other network technology can come close to delivering the quality or perfomance that it can deliver and it is best to keep two separate networks indefinitely.

The reality is probably somewhere in between.

Networks have historically been depicted as clouds. Why? I always wondered that. Most likely because it was an easy way to depict something ubiquitous (clouds are pretty much everywhere), something nebulous (because its form and shape changes as nodes are added and/or removed), and something powerful (clouds can become storms).

dg

Application delivery continues to grow in focus over the last few years, and 2008 is no exception...