Page 5 of 5
Overall with regard to the competitive piece, Cisco has been a lot more explicitly aggressive lately, particularly against HP and Juniper. A lot of your executives have made public reference to Cisco getting more aggressive, and dishing back a lot of the competitive rhetoric we saw from both [HP and Juniper]. Why does that help you? Cisco's been traditionally less prone to attacking competitors in the public space, and taking more of a high road.
Well, I think that when I view what our competitors have said about Cisco for the last few years, I think our employees, our team and our partner community have been frustrated with the commentary and some of the public attacks we've taken. So we're trying to be balanced but crank up the competitive spirit of the business with our employees and our partner community.
Frankly, we want to engage our customers and partners to help them fully understand what we believe is the reality of what our solutions can do for customers through our partners, as opposed to what our competition would tell them. That's why we want to be a little more public with our position on certain issues.
So it's definitely a strategy to be more public with Cisco's position there than in previous years?
Well, I think that's fairly obvious.
What I've heard from partners especially since a lot of that started is that it gives them the air cover they need in these competitive situations. But I hear other partners say that Cisco is giving away the competitive high road it's always had and that you're also acknowledging the stepped-up threat from HP and Juniper, competitively speaking. Can you respond to that?
I think that as we all get a little bit more vocal, we'll find what balance we need, because we want to ensure that our customers and partners understand our position on many of these issues being raised by our competition. We'll find the balance over time, and much like our partners, we have some employees who really love it and some who are…it's new, so people are trying to get used to it. We'll focus on the issues and focus on our partners and customers [so that they] understand our position on these issues.
Do you anticipate any further additions or subtractions to your team? Are all the theater heads in your organization in place at this point?
Yeah, our organization is well defined. And our leadership team is in place and right now it's all about executive and working more closely with our customers.
<< Previous
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
