The Architect: Q&A with John Chambers

Government and health care: You can’t afford the health-care expenses coming at us in this nation or around the world, so we’ll have to see a decade-long run of collaboration and health-care productivity or we’ll break the health-care system. As they said at the [World Economic Forum] – and these are the top health-care experts in the world – all of them [health-care systems] are on the verge of bankruptcy.

There’s no choice but to change. So the nice thing about our partnering portfolio is, yes, I think we’ve hit the market transitions right, yes, we win in many of the areas, we are spread a little bit thin just like our partners, and if you have to prioritise, pick and choose based on the customer segment you’re doing.

What does the next-generation VAR look like? Do they need to be business consultants asking these questions you are? What skills do they need to have as we go through these market transitions?

 The major thing is just take it one step up in terms of being able to understand the advantages of architectural sell regardless of how many you sell. The nice thing about the portfolio at Cisco is you can add value on top of that. You can get very sophisticated about what you do from a security perspective, or what does this really mean in terms of video and collaboration to health care, or what does it means in safety and security for customers in terms of how do you combine safety and security in an architecture, with any device, any content. I can take it up one level, second level, third level.

Then there’ll be a set [of partners] that really gets good, that takes this as an architectural play and translates that into either across-the- board productivity and business model changes, or, in a specific industry: defence, or retail or manufacturing, etc.

But all of us have to move. Merely providing a router and a switch and responding to an RFP is probably not going to make either one of us very much money, although I want them to win it like I want my team to win it. Playing at that level, the ability to make money is going to be more in services so services will be a key element of the future.

We are an ecosystem partner, and that’s a lot different than what HP and IBM are doing. They clearly want it for themselves.