Cisco Banks on 'Quad Play' for Sustained Growth


Thu, September 07, 2006

CIO

Cisco Systems Chief Executive Officer John Chambers Wednesday stoked the networking vendor’s love affair with IT investors by pointing to the company’s unified communications strategy and broad product portfolio as a way to sustain growth over the long term.

At the company’s annual financial analyst conference in New York, executives said Cisco will sustain double-digit growth through the rest of the decade by incorporating data, voice, video and mobile capabilities—what it calls its "quadruple play"—across product lines, while addressing the service provider, enterprise, commercial and consumer markets.

The company will announce a video conferencing product in the next few months, and fine-tune quality control for voice over IP (VoIP) and video across several router lines, executives said.

"Now if you’re the innovator and the leader, it protects you from the startups and the advanced players," Chambers said.

Cisco Chief Executive Officer John Chambers
John Chambers

Cisco expects to sustain a 10 percent to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth rate through the rest of the decade.

The company will be able to take advantage of the breakdown of barriers among vertical-market product lines, as consumers and professionals increasingly expect to get both corporate data and home and family information anytime, anywhere, Chambers said.

"The network becomes the platform," said Chambers, in a frequently repeated phrase during the event.

At the corporate level, product integration is fueled by a trend in businesses to move from a "command control" style of management to a more collaborative model, he said.

"If you asked me a few years ago, I would have said collaboration could account for maybe 10 percent to 20 percent productivity efficiency, but now I would say that’s closer to ... 30 percent to 50 percent," he said.

The company is banking on business uptake of video collaboration tools to boost network traffic and the need for new infrastructure. The quad play equipment and services Cisco offers will be taken up broadly, by smaller commercial companies as well as Fortune 500 businesses, Chambers said. As an example, he pointed out that a 12-store Subway food chain in Texas has already implemented a quad-play Cisco-based system, which uses video to reduce theft.

Cisco can also help companies innovate and transition to new technologies, noted Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco’s chief development officer. Giancarlo said Cisco "reinvented the TDM PBX [time division multiplex public branch exchange] industry ... bringing it into the unified communications era" through VoIP gateways and other products and services.

In response to questions from attendees, Giancarlo said, "we will be introducing ... a very significant video product in the next few months." Though he declined to announce details, attendees said they had been expecting the company to announce a high-end, enterprise video-conferencing product.

Continue Reading

Virtualization and cloud are driving new requirements for data center network performance, VM support, automation and simplified orchestration. This paper outlines Extreme Networks® open fabric approach to high speed, low latency networks for modern data centers.
The evolution of the network to provide the intelligence needed to address user, device and application mobility is underway. In this white paper, Extreme Networks® outlines the five phases required to bring mobility into the network.
Individuals and businesses alike are embracing the digital revolution. Social networks and digital devices are being used to engage government, businesses and civil society, as well as friends and family.
Whether you need to build a business case for a UC system, or are ready to select a new solution, this white paper offers a thorough, side-by-side comparison of ShoreTel and Avaya offerings to help you make informed decisions.
Compared with Cisco products, ShoreTel UC can offer numerous advantages, including streamlined deployment and management, easier scalability, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
This must-read publication features independent research from Gartner, providing a wealth of information around best in breed Unified Communication systems. 12 Unified Communications vendor ratings, along with their strengths and cautions, are provided.
Join us for this live web event where featured Forrester Research principal analyst, Art Schoeller and Interactive Intelligence senior vice president, Joe Staples will discuss these topics and help you be ready to take the best advantage of the upcoming year and the contribution your contact center can make to the success of your business.
Tune into this insightful webinar to see Riverbed Technology product marketing manager Joe Ghory present the facts on how you can ensure consistent performance wherever workers connect, get the most out of limited connectivity, and accomplish more by eliminating round trips and slow latency.
As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.
Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center