Interview: Cisco's John Chambers

Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers recently sat down with ChannelWeb's Jennifer Hagendorf Follett for a wide-ranging discussion that touched on everything from the future of networking to the economy to the presidential election. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation.

Cisco has been moving well beyond just selling routers and switches. Is it still appropriate to call Cisco a networking company?

Well, I think the network will become the enabler of all forms of IT and communications. So our core competency is the network capability. But the network's moving from being dumb plumbing, if you will, to enabling business solutions which change not only the way we work, but the way we live, play and learn. And so the relevance of the network is evolving and with that Cisco and our partners will have to evolve as well. The nice thing is that this is an issue that means a large amount of growth and profit opportunities for us all.

Given all the pies you have your fingers in, which one technology do you think is really the indicator of where this company is going?

Maybe this is the right way to answer it -- the key area that probably we are architecting more than anybody else is the movement toward collaboration enabled by network tools called Web 2.0 ... Instead of doing one or two [major projects] a year, I can do 20, and 20 may end up being too conservative. It will be the productivity generator for the next decade.

What are the ways that you think your channel partners need to move to really latch onto this opportunity and make the most of it?

Well, the exciting thing is we're all proud to be plumbers. And plumbing is a very honorable profession and it has been very lucrative for us all. And we can continue to be plumbers, or we can take plumbing and move it to intelligent networks and begin to provide solutions. So each of us in our partnering mode has to decide what is our opportunity and appetite for evolution and realize that [if] we just really install products and make them work that we'll not have near the margins as if we're able to bring solutions to customers and capabilities in business model change.

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