John Chambers, Cisco CEO, kicked off Cisco Live 2011, the company’s annual IT conference and discussed the priorities for the coming year. Key focus areas include continuing leadership in routing and switching, driving business productivity with its collaboration products, supporting virtualization and cloud for data centers, improving core architecture and security features and expanding video throughout the enterprise. Chambers described video as becoming the primary form of IT with pervasive video dominating how companies will communicate with employees and partners. To achieve these goals, Chambers announced plan to grow through faster innovation and simplification of its business processes. The overall takeaway is Cisco is becoming leaner and more focused to manage the rapid change taking place in today’s workforce and to drive business productivity through its primary technology areas.
Collaboration is a major direction for Cisco and speakers identified four areas of importance- virtual, visual, mobile and social- to enable collaboration from any workspace with premise and cloud solutions. Its collaboration suite encompasses multiple products in customer care, conferencing, social software, messaging, IP communications and mobile applications. Cisco’s new Cius tablet in early pilots has received positive reviews from users who deployed the virtual desktop device. Cisco also announced several improvements for mobile users with multi-platform capability.
Throughout the conference, Cisco stressed their commitment to listening to its customers and delivering innovative solutions to meet future workplace requirements. They have delivered on the product roadmap commitments made last year, which indicate tangible results of R&D efforts across multiple product categories. As a $40 billion company, Cisco has established strong business partners, such as British Telecom, Dimension Data, IBM Business Services and Orange to deploy its solutions globally. Importantly, they recognize the need to transform their business model with innovation and execution to continue to achieve its business goals and provide a collaborative customer experience in the post PC world.