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Job two, and this is where you might be getting some sense from the partners, we did a pretty major realignment of our engineering organization, and did it in two phases. [The most recent], in December, we really brought the portfolio together in ways that reflected the architectural value propositions we've been describing. Marthin De Beer [Cisco senior vice president] now owns the full collaboration and video portfolio. That's the portfolio that leverages video over the network, links to applications and Telepresence, and is our video business that was in the former Scientific Atlanta. [That portfolio] led to the decision to move forward with the NDS acquisition, which fills out our Videoscape architecture for delivering media securely to consumers and businesses in the marketplace. It feels better.
It feels better in the data center, where we have the full portfolio of Nexus, from the 7000s to the virtual switches and fabric extenders, and the UCS, all under one leader and a little more tied together. What you see is fewer separate messages and engagements, and that's been well received by our partners. It took a little work to make that happen.
The other area I've heard good feedback on from partners is collaboration. WebEx has good stuff going. UC has good stuff going. I think some of the excitement [comes from] the announcements we made at Enterprise Connect about our Jabber client and how that becomes a standard soft client in addition to what we're delivering on the devices. We're opening up our communication experience onto iPad and Android clients and Microsoft clients -- this explosion of devices. That's been well received by our partners. I do believe that we can do better as a company in exploiting the role of the network.
In the area of security, I'm very excited to see the new leadership there. Chris Young, after a great career at RSA and more recently VMware, is really grabbing the bull by the horns. Our partners feel we could step up and do a much better job of integration.
We have the enterprise networking group and the service provider networking group -- it all makes more sense. Engineering has its clusters that align almost perfectly to the architectures we present to our customers in the field. We can do business more quickly and simply.
That is a big part of what we've heard from a lot of the partners who are familiar with Cisco at a strategic level and play in a bunch of these different areas. Can you drill down a little bit more on how these changes translate to ease of doing business for the channel?
The primary advantages so far have been being really clear on who's making a decision. At the end of the day, if we have to make a decision on something in distribution, or be more agile in what we do with a service provider and partner with them in a unique way, we have to be more effective. With the complex portfolio and broad portfolio we have, sometimes you just need to look at the factors and make a decision.
Nine months since the last time we spoke, we're much better at making decisions faster. There are less people showing up with our partners having dialogue and discussion. There are more people who can make the call, and less people who are just listening. Before, there were a lot of people showing up, but not enough of them empowered to make the decision. That became very frustrating.
We're moving that empowerment much closer to the edge of the business in the countries we operate in, and that's the direction we're headed. We've seen good things happen so far, but we've got more work to do. That's what our partners want from us and what we're committed to delivering.
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