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When we last interviewed you here about 18 months ago, we asked you where did you see a hole in the portfolio and you said, very quickly, security. I wonder if you've plugged that hole and can you talk a little about Cisco in security?
Sure, but let me approach that with what would have been the question from 24 to 36 months ago to give it a tint. Our challenge then was mobility. Here we are No. 1 in almost every mobile area we need to be in: wireless LANs, which grew 24 percent last quarter, the mobile edge with our ASR 5000. Service provider Wi-Fi, on fire. We saw that change and went after it aggressively. Small cell -- we're doing that as well, bringing this capability to service providers. We took what were the biggest challenges and became No. 1.
We're doing the same thing with cloud. Three to four years ago, we didn't see that coming as well. When Padmasree [Warrior] came over -- she was the co-lead with Pankaj [Patel] and now leads not just CTO but [is] also chief strategist; I wish I'd moved her there earlier; she's really good at this -- I said to her, Padma, I need a cloud strategy. Fast forward to today, and I imagine you do your homework on this, we've got more than half of the customers who are truly using productive clouds. So that's our ability to adjust even if we don't see things coming quickly.
It's the same thing with software in the data center, which we've seen coming for a long time. Why do you think we've done Insiemi? You know what we're going to do there: the best ASICs, the best hardware, the best software team and our speed to market. It isn't just about the number of transistors and capacity; it's about how many spins can you do, and can you get it out there in two to three years, or 12 months? All together, that's a tough team to beat
If you look at our ability in security, or how about in an area like fresh water leakage, where, without the right technology, 35 percent of it is lost, and with the right technology, you could take that down to 5 percent. Look at electricity: more efficient, and you could buy it based on carbon emissions and pay a premium if you choose. Look at ... well take every automotive plant, which has about 50,000 IP devices in it. Think about what happens when you begin to connect those.
When you begin to connect the unconnected, amazing things happen. But also, when you have this many billions of devices, you can't just bring them back to the cloud or a single data center -- you'll clog even the widest bandwidth if you do, whether it's wireless or wired. So, what if you could make the decision on handling that at the edge of the network, or get a service person to capture that data -- that's distributed intelligence throughout the network.
If you think about the software aspects and the architectural play, this is right in our home-run area. Some of our peers will come at us with just software-only. Well, then they have to figure out what's in the network, which means they have to take snapshots and program those snapshots. Meanwhile, we open up our APIs. What happens then?
The best technology doesn't always win. While I think we have the best technology here, our key is execution. We have to execute at Cisco speed with even more consistency than we did two years ago. So in the last two years, we reinvented ourselves again. Look at what Rob Lloyd has done, what Gary Moore has done, a world-class job in operations. Edzard Overbeek, what he did in Asia Pacific, and the amazing job in engineering done by Pankaj [Patel]. I can keep going. What you have to do is stay the course, adjust or reinvent. We are strongly positioned for the future.
And that goes back to our succession planning. It should be a non-event. It should just naturally occur, and we know in our industry there are very few of those that have gone well. Whether it's right or wrong -- and I do believe it's right -- we're going to be transparent. You'll see us move around our players, out of silos -- which used to be the way you developed people -- and take a services person and move him into engineering, or put an engineering person into operations. You'll see us move around our team with regular frequency with the job being to not just see who's been in silos, but who does well and who will struggle a bit. That's what leadership is about.
NEXT: How Important Was Paring Down Cisco's Councils And Boards?
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