The Architect: Q&A with John Chambers

he cloud initiative is at the heart of Chambers’ vision, which is far beyond that of a networking and infrastructure vendor with a nifty server play.

These days Chambers is asking solution providers to invest heavily in his vision of network architectures: the idea that the network is the centre of platforms and frameworks for all forms of communications products and services, as opposed to just siloed, product vs product sales.

The architecture play, as Cisco sees it, is all-encompassing, with the cloud as the next frontier. It extends from network core to network edge – data centre to mobile device – and serves as an organising principle for everything from switches and routers to video, servers, wireless access points and security. Cisco can, and does, do them all. And what Chambers is asking partners to do isn’t to be everything to everyone and attempt to sell everything but, in essence, see the architectural forest for the product trees and map the way they sell Cisco to that strategy.

“If you’re selling a single, stand- alone product, you’re ignoring perhaps the strongest thing Cisco does, which is an architectural approach, which protects their investments, allows them to move into new markets relatively seamlessly,” Chambers says.

“Many of our partners will say what level of differentiation they want to add. So there’s room for just making the architectural stack work well together. There’s room for saying, ‘We need to go sell that in a given geography or industry vertical.’ And that’s much better than their counterparts that are selling stand-alone unified communications, stand-alone security, stand-alone wireless, stand-alone routers and switches – which, by the way, were designed to work together,” he says.

Transitions don’t wait

Five years down the line, Chambers says, IT and business processes will be so entwined they’ll be practically one and the same. It’s Cisco’s architecture vision that will best accommodate that trend, he said.