Chambers To Partners: Collaboration Key To Growth

Cisco CEO and chairman John Chambers told a packed house at the 2008 Cisco Partner Summit that innovation and collaboration, not only utilizing technology but between partners, will be key growth drivers over the next several years.

In his keynote address Wednesday, Chambers said collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies, anchored by "visual networking," mark the second largest market transition of the last two decades, second only to the early 1990s Internet boom.

On the technology side, Chambers hammered home a message of "collaboration-enabled by networking tools" not only to fuel communication between companies, but to better fuel communication and collaboration between Cisco partners to develop robust solutions targeted at customers' unique business needs.

"This is about a whole new generation. It is about 3.0," he said. "It is about where we can go together that has not been done before. It is about catching more market transitions than have ever occurred in the industry that are occurring at a faster and faster pace. The transitions can be on products, where it's not going to be about routers and switches and data centers and security and wireless and the home strategy versus service providers It's going to be about any device to any content over any combination of networks in whatever ways we want with communities pulling together toward a common goal."

John Chambers at the Cisco Partner Summit

Chambers said capitalizing on collaborative tools now will enable all forms of communications within IT, business and customers.

Chambers outlined the "collaborative channel," which will enable collaboration between Cisco and its partners, partners and other partners, and partners and their customers.

"We've got to learn how do we go to market together not only talking technology architecture, but business architecture and tie the two very tightly together in a way the market is striving for," he said. "There's a reason the market is looking to a place like Google. It's because they're not seeing innovation from the traditional players and we've got to realize that this is a void we can and should fill together."

Chambers told partners they have to capture the market while it's in transition and create and offer solutions built around it. If partners don't strike well before the time of transition, they stand to be left in the dust.

"What is your differentiated strategy?" he asked. "I can't hammer this home enough. It needs to be built around market transitions. If you enter a market that's already going well your ability to gain market share is ugly. It costs you margins to hammer it out for one or two points. But if you catch markets in transition, not only do you catch the mindshare and the hearts of your customers, you catch the market share and profitability to go with it."

Later, Chambers added: "It is the ability to be able to say here's what's going to happen, here's what's we can do together with our partners, and then deliver it."

But Chambers said a go-it-alone approach can stifle innovation, while partnering, much like Cisco does through acquisition, helps lead innovation and offer more targeted solutions.

"We will create a level of communications which will motivate ourselves and, if we do it together right, our partner and employee base as well."

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