Yesterday, our CEO John Chambers sent the following message to Cisco employees outlining the state of the company, upcoming changes and where Cisco is taking the network. Transparency is a key tenet of Cisco’s culture, and given I’ve received a few media inquiries today as to the nature of the message, I’m sharing the letter in its entirety below.
Message from John Chambers
As many of you know, my values and approach to leadership are grounded in part by what I learned from my parents. Both doctors, they taught me to fuel what’s healthy and to heal what’s not. They taught me to seek solutions to challenges, not symptoms. Over the years as your leader here at Cisco, I’ve also learned many things. I’ve learned to read market transitions by listening deeply to our customers and partners. And I’ve learned to adjust when and where it’s needed, quickly and transparently.
With this in mind, I’d like to share with you my thoughts about Cisco, as Gary Moore also shares his perspective after the first 30 days as our COO. About what’s working well and is fundamental to who we are and what we stand for. And about aspects of Cisco today we need to change, what you can expect from me and what I expect from you as we execute against our decisions and move forward, together.
First, as always, let’s start with our customers. I’ve spent significant time recently reaching out to many of them around the world. I’ve had extremely candid conversations about why they buy Cisco, why they don’t, and what they think we do best. These conversations reinforce what I have known to be true about Cisco: our customers believe we are a company of passionate people that take time to imagine what’s possible, and to do what it takes to make them successful.
I’ve also solicited very direct feedback from many of you—as individuals, in small group meetings and through your participation in my blog postings and our CEC discussion forums (internal Cisco forums). You are telling me that there is a reason you are at Cisco – our culture, our values, our vision. You’ve also made it very clear that we must make it simpler to do the work we love to do, and to accelerate the impact we know we are making for our customers.
It is clear to me that we have incredible foundational strengths – our people, our relationships, our innovation and our strategy to extend the role of the network. We have anticipated market transitions and made good decisions in capturing them. We are disrupting the data center space. We are redefining the collaboration market. And we have gone big on video, a market that is changing society and business completely.
“Fabric computing is a fixture on the radar screen of many IT groups, driven by the increased penetration of virtualization and prospects for cloud computing.As virtualization penetration increases, IT organizations will deploy virtual machine (VM) mobility, which will demand more attention to a fabric-based infrastructure that better integrates server, storage and networking for greater agility and faster time to deploy.” Based on this observation, Gartner George J Reiss and Andrew Butler organized recently a survey to evaluate which vendors are the most credible and ready to address the challenges of virtualization and cloud computing.
Cisco pioneered the vision of Ethernet-based “Unified Fabric” for the data center and has been shipping products to support that vision for over three years. Subsequently it introduced Unified Computing and Unified Network Services, all of which have formed the building blocks for Cisco’s Data Center Fabric. Competitors have validated Cisco’s vision by scrambling to deliver their own versions of the Fabric.
On March 30th starting at 9:00 am PST, Cisco executives and experts , partners and customers will supplement this Fabric vision and showcase its evolution, while bringing multiple proof points to bear. And in a pure Cisco spirit, to enrich a very open conversation, we invited the Senior Analyst Andre Kindnesss from Forrester Research who wrote recently about “The Dark Horse In The Datacenter Fabric Race?” and the Program VP Data Center Network Services Cindy Borovick from IDC to share their vision.
If you want to be among (or amongst) the first to know what’s cooking at Cisco, this is your chance ! This event will be live and we hope to hear from you.
As companies grow large, we have a natural human tendency to declare them incapable of getting out of their own way. We see them as slow, inefficient and plodding dinosaurs surrounded by fleet-of-foot small companies that are so much more capable of getting things done — because of their apparent smallness.
And while there are certainly large companies that suffer from bigness, there are also quite a few that demonstrate amazingness, if you’ll allow me to make up a word (for agility, beyond compare). One of them? The mighty, much criticized Bell System, created in the transition zone between the 19th and 20th centuries.
All too often, vendors talk about products or features when customers really want solutions and “how do I get there?” models for evolving their business. Cloud Computing is a topic that definitely falls into the latter category because it isn’t a single piece of hardware or software, but rather it’s a new way to align business needs with technology capabilities.
For many companies, Cloud Computing represents both an opportunity and a challenge. From an opportunity perspective, it potentially represents a chance to leapfrog your competition by leveraging technology as a core driver of new business models. This would create a compelling business differentiation and it’s most likely what every CIO will be talking about in 2011. From a challenge perspective, it introduces some new types of change that your company will need to address, such as:
[WARNING] It’s very possible that this post could get slightly lengthy, so if you’d like the cliff-notes version, check out Cisco’s Enterprise Private Cloud homepage and click on the short video at the top. 3 minutes could save you months or years on your Cloud Computing strategy. Evolving the Data Center to Private Cloud
Advanced-Level Services
Advanced-level network services are a necessity for a scalable virtualized data center and a key to cloud service delivery. These services provide application acceleration and server load balancing to improve user productivity, and ensure optimal resource utilization, and they monitor quality of service. They also provide security services that can isolate applications and resources in logical zones in virtualized data centers and cloud environments to ensure regulatory compliance and reduce risk of data breaches.
Deploying Services
While enterprises have been adopting server virtualization and cloud computing in order to realize the benefits of reduced server sprawl, reduced operating costs, and greater levels of application availability, they are doing so while struggling with inflexibility in the underlying network. Deploying advanced-level network services in a virtualized data center environment is challenging. It has been done using dedicated hardware in static network topologies. This does not provide the flexibility to support virtualized workloads, and as a result organizations are challenged to support on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning, workload mobility, and public or private cloud deployments. This limits organizations’ ability to efficiently deploy new applications, increases operational costs, and acts as a roadblock to adoption of virtualization and cloud computing.
