A Conversation With Cisco's John Chambers

Photo by Noah Berger
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?

Chambers: 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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