What makes cisco successful

At IBM, I watched friends get laid off. At Wang, where I was a manager, I oversaw five rounds of layoffs during a period of 18 months. It was a painful time, but I learned what happens when companies lack the courage to disrupt themselves.

After I left Wang, I got in touch with friends and people in my network, and four months later I was talking about opportunities at 22 companies.

One of them was Cisco. I was told it needed someone who understood how to scale the enterprise and identify market transitions. I knew there was a great future in networking equipment, because the internet seemed ready to take off. I joined in as the senior vice president of worldwide operations, and in I became the CEO.

In the 20 years since then, a whole series of shifts have occurred in the kinds of technology companies rely on and in how they consume solutions from Cisco and other suppliers. Anticipating those transitions and getting ahead of them has driven our evolution from routers and switches to mobile and video technology to application-centric infrastructure and cloud computing.

Back in the s internet traffic was routed through fiber-optic cable. Within a few years the industry had shifted to switching technology, which allowed more data to travel through the same cable. In telephony the market shifted from analog to voice over internet protocol VoIP , which allowed companies to send phone calls on the same network they used for computer data. Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, and other companies missed that shift and were left behind.

Think about how the internet has expanded from a medium for e-mail to one for web pages and then streaming video—and how users have shifted from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets for accessing all that information. Now think about the shift from owning server farms to outsourcing to the cloud. More recently, the internet of everything, which is the explosion of connections across people, processes, data, and objects, has put demands on business to create new communication channels for new kinds of devices.

Some of these changes required consumers to buy new devices. All of them required companies to make big investments in technology. For Cisco, each transition required a decision about when to jump from selling a profitable product to a new technology—often one that would cannibalize our existing product line.

These jumps were critical, though, if we wanted to stay ahead of the curve. The best indication of when to make the jump frequently comes from our customers. Many years ago, before the market moved from routing to switching, I visited Ford Motor Company, a key customer. Executives there told me they were exploring a new networking technology called Fast Ethernet.

They told me about a company called Crescendo Communications that was making advances in that area. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.

Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Cisco has a pattern of acquiring companies to make gains in market acceleration, market expansion, and new market entry. Cisco was founded in Cisco's recent activities reflect its pursuit of a prominent role in 5G and maintaining its leading position as an infrastructure platform business.

This approach was clear when Cisco acquired AppDynamics Inc. This is a buying opportunity. Cisco is one of the largest players in the game when it comes to networking and telecommunications equipment. Its name can be found branded on physical products you would see every day, like phones and modems, but it is also responsible for behind-the-scenes products you wouldn't see, like network switches and other hardware for data centers. It is this diversification that gives Cisco a strong competitive advantage for the long run, not having to rely solely on one iron in the fire like many of its competitors.

Over the last year, Cisco has continued to build out and strengthen its offerings. This is an important move in light of the imminent change to 5G.

In August, Cisco announced its intent to purchase privately held Voicea, which created an artificial intelligence voice assistant that joins meetings and takes notes. This addition will be an appropriate add-on to one of Cisco's services, Webex, an online video and conferencing platform.

These two acquisitions will take time to integrate and the company has not given figures on cost savings or potential for revenue growth, but I believe both additions will add value to the business in the long run.

In addition to expanding its business through acquisition, Cisco is also staying current with business trends. Over the last few years, SaaS, or software as a service, has been an extremely popular business model due to its primarily subscription-based revenue and high margins.

How it is going faster than ever? For startups that encounter a company like Cisco, what do you need to know if you have talks that go places with it? We spoke to the company CFO, senior vice president of corporate development, and the general manager and executive vice president of security and collaboration to help us understand how all of the pieces fit together, why they acquire so many companies and what startups can learn from their process.

Cisco, as you would expect, has developed a rigorous methodology over the years to identify startups that could fit its vision.