Interview: Cisco's John Chambers

I think our challenge is the same. How do we evolve from selling boxes to systems and solutions. And remember from the first day I came here to Cisco I moved us from a direct approach to the market to a channel approach to the market which is what we will continue to be. So it's how do we together evolve to where this market is going not to where it has been in the past.

To be fair, that's the message that you have been putting out to your partners for several years now. Are there specifics that it make it more difficult now than it has been in the past?

It's actually accelerated now, because a lot of the basic concepts on collaboration are now taking off. A lot of the acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies which many people would have said, "No, that's just for the young people or that's what our kids do" what they are now realizing that in business ... with replicatable process built into these capabilities, it probably will be the next frontier for productivity. Put a different way, the network will probably enable the next major wave of IT spending as well as communication spending. So the role of the network has changed: it's changed from being infrastructure, primarily a box mentality, to an architecture approach that provides business solutions. And as such, we at Cisco have to change and so do our channel partners.

With so much more emphasis now on applications, do you feel like you have the right set of channel partners to make that push?

There will be certain channel partners who primarily stay within a product area or a solution type area, there will be others who architecturally play across the whole gamut ... As we move into software-as-a-service and other related areas --bandwidth-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, processing power-as-a-service--how do we sell differently and how do we evolve as an organization? So if we do our job with our channel partners, we outline here's where we think the industry is going, here are the multiple areas we can work on together, and then each of our partners have to say here's where my expertise is and here's where I think I can have sustainable differentiation and then here's where I need to go.

Given your planning cycle of three to five years, what's your vision for what Cisco will look like in five years?

The future will be about any device to any content and it will be about intelligent networks. The second thing is that everything will come as a service. It will start off with software-as-a-service, but there will be services as a service, you will be able to buy technical support from our customers on either a contract basis or on an as needed basis If you think of Cisco three to five years from now, we have the opportunity along with our partners to be the most influential company in the world, not just on communications, but also in IT. And the role of the network will evolve dramatically, moving from merely transport or plumbing to more of an intelligent infrastructure that makes it completely transparent to where your applications are, where your storage is, where the processors are, what type of device you're on, [whether you are] at home or at your work or in your car or at a hotel " your services automatically find you and move to you.

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