I just arrived home from a couple of days visiting customers in Asia and I was a little surprised by all the attention around Cisco’s increased competitive posture. It seems some people are surprised Cisco is calling out its smaller networking competitor by name, although I’ve heard few mentions of their Wall Street Journal cartoon advertisements ridiculing Cisco a while back. I guess that didn’t count.
What matters most to customers is whether their networking partner is ready right now to help them adapt to, and benefit from, the massive network-centric changes that are transforming their businesses and their customers’ businesses.
My recent trip to Asia provided some great examples of exactly what I’m talking about:
First, Mobility is red hot. Tablet growth is exploding as the shift from the PC to new consumer based devices accelerates. With our service provider customers, the new Mobile Packet Core is THE number one conversation. The Cisco ASR 5000, combined with our CRS-1 and CRS-3, is the most innovative technology available to handle this explosion of mobile data and develop new services to help service providers monetize mobile content.
Twenty of the world’s top twenty five mobile operators are already deploying the Cisco ASR 5000 and this number is only going to increase. We also hear growing interest in Asia for SP Wi-Fi as an alternate method to address the escalating requirements for mobile bandwidth and data services. For sure, there’s a lot of competition for the mobile packet core and SP Wi-Fi, but our smaller competitor from Sunnyvale just doesn’t seem to be relevant in these conversations.
Cloud is on fire as enterprises accelerate their migration to private cloud to capture the economic, operational and agility benefits. In this area Cisco innovations have rocked the industry. Let’s check the facts. From a decade long position of undisputed leadership in data center switching based on our flagship Catalyst family of Ethernet switches, Cisco led the market with the first purpose built data center core switch and operating system, the Nexus 7000 with Cisco NX-OS software. Then we led the market with the introduction of Unified Fabric on the Nexus 5000, the first to consolidate data center networks over FCoE. We also introduced the first data center fabric extension on the Nexus 2000. And the Nexus 1000 was the industry’s first distributed virtual switch for VMware environments. The Nexus 3000 ultra low-latency switch has achieved immediate success in financial services customers and at massively scalable data centers.
Do you remember not too long ago hopping into your car, driving, across town (when gas was $1- something) to your local retail store and searching the computer department to purchase a cereal box that contained between 2- 8 3.5” (or are you “wise” enough to remember 5.25” floppy) disks? The disk contained software that would entertain us, make us more productive and educate. If you don’t remember that, how about going to the record store and perusing the aisles for hours reading the CD boxes that were twice as big as the CD.
Well those days seem long past; and inserting a disk in anything these days….well, seems a bit ancient.
Cloud
We’re now spoiled with the conveniences of iTunes, Salesforce.com, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo Mail, etc.. In addition, we’re all too familiar with the seemingly millions of applications that run on a myriad of mobile appliances. None of these programs run on our PC’s hard drive. They’re browser based applications that are essentially utility services which we share with thousands of users.
So, I began to ponder the question, “What’s the big deal about the Cloud in Manufacturing and Enterprise?” Read More »
In business, competition makes us stronger. Through competition, we strive to create the best products for our customers, the best programs for our partners, and the best Cisco for the networking industry as a whole.
We embrace healthy competition with competitors such as Avaya, HP, Huawei, and Juniper Networks. Each of our competitors brings its strengths, innovations, and programs to address a variety of customer and partner needs.
Cisco’s customers and the networking industry have benefited from this competitive environment through innovations which make the network faster, greener, and more powerful:
This week’s news about the Cisco’s expanded ASR 9000 system to deliver a single, simplified system for high-speed business, residential, and mobile connectivity
Catalyst 6500 with a new supervisor engine, helping to increase network throughput from 720 Gbps to 2 Tbps, a threefold jump
Less wireless interference thanks to Cisco’s CleanAir technology
Of course, with more than 80% of our business flowing through our partners, we recognize that we cannot just focus on earning market share, but we must also work hard to earn your loyalty every single day.
It’s Cisco’s goal to create the most successful and profitable partners in the world.
As the Next Cisco takes shape, we are re-focusing, reorganizing, and becoming stronger and leaner. We’re focused on five key corporate priorities and, as always, maintaining trust with our customers and partners remains top of mind for me and for the entire executive team, as Rob Lloyd highlighted in his blog post this week.
Together, we had many successes over the years, and you’ve done a great job helping us tell our story.
Here are just a few highlights from Cisco partners:Read More »
When most people think about Payment Card Industry security, they think of architecture designs and security standards documents to help merchants protect cardholder data.
As the Cisco retail team worked on our Cisco solution for PCI DSS 2.0, we decided to combine the Science of Compliance (Cisco solution and the Validated Design Guide) with the Art of Compliance, a series of artistic work interpreting security in a new light.
Working with Adam Hagen, Cisco Global Integrated Marketing Communications Manager, Cisco worked with a series of artists in multiple disciplines including paint, digital, sculpture and video, and asked them to interpret security through their eyes.
The artwork will be on display at the Payment Card Industry Council North America Community meeting September 20-22 in Scottsdale Arizona as part of Cisco and our partners HyTrust, VCE and RSA sponsorship of the event.
To learn more about some of the artists and their interpretation, we filmed some of the artists with their creations while it was installed in the Cisco San Jose campus for a limited run.
Last week at IBC 2011, Cisco announced several examples of how we are implementing Cisco Videoscape™ with International Service Providers. Cisco Videoscape is a service provider solution that lets consumers bring together content from pay TV, online, and on-demand sources to create a truly immersive TV experience on any device.
