Cisco to leverage 30 focus areas to drive future growth

23 May 2009

Starting with six focus areas in 2003, which it had identified to drive future growth and revenue streams, Cisco has now expnded the number five fold to 30. The common theme underpinning all these is the explosion of data traffic over wired and wireless IP networks.

According to Cisco CEO John Chambers, the company is planning to move at a previously un-attempted speed across these areas.

The company's core business of IP infrastructure mainly routers is expected to remain at the heart of its business, however the company is gearing up for what it calls the zetabyte era that will be driven by the movement of massive amounts and data and multimedia traffic. It is therefore working on the original six directions including wireless, optical, home networking, storage network, IP telephony and security.

The company's wireless activities have focused on consolidation of its market lead in consumer and enterprise Wi-Fi; selling IP core networks to 3G, 4G and converged carriers, initiatives into mobile broadband infrastructure through metro network and WiMAX projects. Also on the cards is a possible shift towards a wider range of wireless IP end user devices, possibly including smartphones.

Cisco has also moved into blade servers and storage. This will support two trends that will serve to ramp up the use of IP networks, the company's lifeblood and also be key to mobile and converged operators.

These include cloud services that store users' data and applications on huge central servers, possibly run by operators and accessed securely over the internet and the emergence of machine-to-machine and 'smart-grid' applications over IP and broadband-class connections rather than the conventional low speed, low power M2M systems.