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A lot of what partners don't see are internal meetings and as part of the restructuring effort, I understand Cisco is spending less time and emphasis on internal councils and boards -- that's been streamlined. How does that help the whole process?
So that process changed a lot. We went down to three fundamental councils where we needed a tight degree of ownership, quite frankly. [There's] the enterprise segment council, which comprises public sector, the verticals we touch and the commercial markets, and the portfolio of technology and services and partnerships. Then there's the service provider [council]. Those two councils represent primary access to market. Instead of five, we have two. Then there are the differences we see in the emerging markets, and that's been streamlined around a council, where we've made substantial progress in the last nine months driving local execution capabilities to get us to become more local in those emerging countries around the world -- countries where a lot of future growth is going to be.
But only three councils, and the real operating goal is the right degree of accountability for market share, and growth based on our partners and our go-to-market in these new engineering groups and in these geographies. The difference from the past is that instead of a loose coalition of councils and boards, we have a very tight operating model. We know market share matters; we know that growth and competitive intensity matters. It's a much simplified model.
[Cisco COO] Gary Moore has been driving a lot of that new execution model. He's got the credibility of having built out our collaborative services business over the last eight to 10 years, and he's done so in a way that has always maintained that collaborative nature with our partners. Nine months into it, we're improving, and Gary and I are committed to making progress.
What are the additional areas where Cisco needs to improve? What substantial changes are left to be made?
You know, I think now it's a matter of optimization and really listening to the big trends in the market, and this is where I think it's pretty exciting what's going on.
It's clear the devices are changing. There's this massive shift from client/server [technology] to the new mobile, consumer-oriented device. That was a conversation I was just having with one of our partners -- a massive change in the market, which creates opportunities. Applications are changing from monolithic, heavy, every-three-to-five-year upgrades to a much more SaaS-based model. Think of the implications of moving to SaaS-based delivery. Mobility is exploding. Video is exploding across not only consumer applications at home and in terms of our entertainment and in social networks, but it is exploding in the enterprise -- really hitting mainstream government and enterprise networks.
Think of the data center and private cloud. A year ago, we talked about private cloud and we saw so much energy in the transformational architecture. A year into this, it's just going faster -- the massive opportunity to bring that kind of architectural perspective in the data center and the enablement of private clouds so our customers can save money and move more quickly. There's so much change in that, and with it comes opportunity.
What's next? Probably trying to tie those changes together and help our partners understand that. after all, the network touches all of those changes. Partners recognize the business models are shifting, and this does introduce some risk into their model and their service delivery models, but this is a very exciting period of time and I feel as much change now as I've ever felt in 18 years here. That always leads to opportunity. Get ready for a landscape shifting ever more quickly, and billions of dollars changing buckets.
I think the next stage for Cisco is work with our partners to connect those changes together and then help our partners actually bring solutions to these areas. The description is less 'whole offer,' but more about an integrated solution that allows them to capture a larger percentage of wallet share. If you sell an architecture, you expand wallet share, you're more relevant with customers and you expand services. The network touches everything. We said it a year ago and it's absolutely true today. One job in the next few years is to show how the network sits under all of these changes.
NEXT: The Cloud Uptake For Partners
