The Architect: Q&A with John Chambers

You don’t so much interview John Chambers as intercept him. When CRN grabbed half an hour with Cisco’s chairman and chief executive officer, he was fresh from meeting with the world's economic power elite and talking to partners, customers and analysts in Britain.

But tucked into his cozy but unremarkable office in Building 10 of Cisco’s sprawling San Jose, California, headquarters – telePresence, yes, window, no – Chambers is happy to expound.

Having just entered his 16th year as Cisco’s top executive, he’s as affably intense as ever, anticipating questions and subquestions and follow-up questions: a mind percolating before your eyes even as, in conversation, he politely waits for you to finish your thought.

“At the 10,000-foot level, what’s most exciting is that many of the market transitions we anticipated happening are happening,” Chambers says. “The network is becoming the platform not just for all forms of communications and IT, but it’s going to enable a different generation of productivity around collaboration, it’s going to change the data centre, it’s going to change health care, it’s going to be at the centre of everything from security to video. The exciting thing about Cisco and its partners is we’re going to play there together. We are better together.”

Today's Cisco is no longer just the king of networking vendors. The toddler unified computing system – its major server and data centre play – ensured that “there hasn’t been a new hardware player in the data centre for decades, and contrary to all the prognostications, we are breaking away there”, Chambers said.

Cisco’s next big gambit will be getting its partners to fully embrace the cloud. To help them get at that opportunity, executives at the recent Partner Summit in New Orleans rolled out cloud partner programs that give resellers avenues into the cloud, from building clouds to operating clouds to reselling clouds.

The rollout could be huge not only for Cisco partners but for the channel as a whole, since Cisco is widely viewed as the leader in delivering innovative channel programs that bring partners big profits in tough-to-tackle markets.

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