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If you could name one competitor above all to Cisco, who would you name?
That's an easy one. It's all about market transitions, and that's where people get it wrong. I was back in West Virginia this past weekend. They put up 70 points against a ranked team, Baylor, and a quarterback threw for 45 completions out of 51 with no interceptions, 656 yards and 8 TDs. No one had done that before. They're a football team at a university in transition and they're getting it right. Our issue is getting transitions right.
I look at the competition not in the negative point of view but in a positive point of view: How do you adjust to those [transitions]. Our competition is purely our ability to execute off of transitions, good or bad, and you look back at our track record and it's been extremely good. So the key takeaway from the discussion: What Cisco does better than anyone else is innovation. But what causes innovation is where we catch market share, being customer driven and partner driven. Our customers told us to go to smart grid. Our customers told us to go to the data center. Our customers told us which video company we should buy, NDS, just as they did Scientific Atlanta in that area before. We compete against market transitions. Individual competitors are just a way of keeping score -- although, as you can tell, I love to keep score.
Our sibling company, UBM TechWeb, recently polled CIOs on their top spending priorities and I wanted to share with you some of that data. They take stock of a lot of the IT buyers and what are their care-abouts, and you see the expected mentions of security and cloud. Video is not high up on that list. Is the opportunity for growth of video really as pervasive as you've been saying it is for the last few years?
More. Video will be the primary way we communicate; we all understand the entertainment aspect. The majority of the video you watch on your TV at home will be user-generated: the soccer games, the West Virginia game I watch over and over so you can keep trash talking [laughs]. But how does Bank of America bring in a financial expert to talk on a branch location? How does that work? My counterpart at one of the largest financial companies talked to me about video expectations and said you're off by two to five [times] what it is. It's not just to communicate, but it's part of the primary way we use IT, with the Medianet and other underlying capabilities beneath it.
I want to come back to your earlier question about security and just say that is one we have to improve on. We brought on Chris Young, and he's made great additions. We're coming along there pretty well. I like our direction on security, and it's time to execute on that.
The number one criticism of Cisco from those customers uniformly is still pricing. That's come up a lot over the years, is Cisco too expensive, and it's in conversation especially now with SDN and dynamics like that changing the conversation. How do you respond to that?
If you watch what we've done, we listen to criticisms. We're coming down Moore's Law faster than we ever have, doubling our price performance every 18 months. We came down very fast in switching about a year and a half ago. In terms of our ability to move pricing down, we absolutely will. Our price performance will increase dramatically as we move forward, but what we're seeing for us and for our partners is if you're selling a standalone product vs. a standalone competitor, you should still win, but the pricing margins on that are going to be smaller. If you're selling on architecture, your win rate goes up dramatically. Your margins go up dramatically.
PUBLISHED OCT. 24, 2012
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