Transforming the Data Center

Transcript

Introduction

John Chambers: Hello. My name is John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, and it's a pleasure to be with you today on a major announcement in terms of the data center and how we see not just Cisco evolving, but the whole industry.

Interview

We are very proud of our history of focusing on innovation and you've seen just a complete number of major new innovations being announced over the last six months. And today is another major step along this line. It really speaks to what is driving this from a customer--a business customer to consumer customer perspective. The world is absolutely communicating differently and they are communicating in ways that allow access to any application, any storage, any processing power, anywhere in the world, and it must start within the data center.

And you're talking about not one-to-one communications, a machine to a person or machine-to-machine, but many-to-many. The consumer is leading in this way, but the business world is following very rapidly behind in terms of what is going to be required for the future. And you see this information sharing in ways that we're just beginning to understand. This will indicate new business models in the marketplace, new ways of doing retail, new ways of doing entertainment, both in the business community and for the consumer as well.

This vision is clearly built around one of virtualization. And in my simple terms what you're talking about is from any device we want to use, based on our own preference, from anywhere in the world, any mode we want - data, voice, video - fixed or not within it, and in any form factor that we want to be able to capture and get to the content that we want, and for the network to be smart enough not only to figure out how to get to that within the data center and over time all the way to the consumer, but also to be smart enough to know what device we're on and to bring it back in a format that we prefer.

In short, the network orchestrates all forms of communication in the future. And what you are seeing here today is just one more step toward this inevitable goal that we see for the future. Again, if you look at Cisco, we don't focus on our competitors. We focus on getting market transitions right, listening to our customers in terms of what those transitions need to be, and being able to do that innovation through a combination of different means.

You've seen our broad data center portfolio continue to evolve. You've seen the Cisco VFrame data center in terms of our commitment there, partnerships with a number of people that you see in the announcement today, including players like VMware, in terms of what it really means to [the data center] future, the continued capability of existing products, the 6500 and the 4500 products, to protect our customers' investments and evolve into new technologies, the Nexus 7000, which was just announced a month ago, and today with the Nexus 5000.

What you're seeing--I think Business Week said it very well--is that "In many ways Cisco is becoming the king of virtualization." Ability not to approach this on a product basis, but architecturally how you tie it together and what are the business solutions either for business or for the consumer that allow this to have the impact in the future. The New York Times said, "Perhaps for the first time, Cisco is making a huge impact in terms of how the next generation data center evolves."

But at the heart of this capability is our ability to get market transitions right, driven by our customers, and to view innovation not just in how you do it yourself, but how you partner and how you acquire. And with Nuova it really is a combination of all of the above - the ability to see where the market's going to go, have the courage to reach out, and have the innovative strategy to position us for where this market's going to go, and to integrate it very tightly into a very broad portfolio base using a common operating system that it obviously specialized, as you would expect for the data center, and common design principles in terms of our vision of where the industry's going, our sustainable differentiation over the next two to five years, and our execution for what we do over the next 12 to 18 months, whether it's execution on products or go-to-market capability.

We're announcing today our intent to acquire Nuova Systems, but this is clearly something that we've had not just on the drawing board, but an understanding now for the last 2.5 years. The engineering team at Nuova is executing with tremendous speed and talent, able to attract that talent toward a common goal. And they've also been able to work very, very tightly with Cisco Systems, both our engineering organization, our sales organization, and our service organization, to ensure not just a smooth launch in this product, but the ability to scale remarkably quick.

It is this technical collaboration, which really is going to be the next wave of productivity enabled by the network, that allow Cisco and Nuova to announce with the speed that we're doing today and the implementation and the scalability that we expect. And you're seeing not just a Nexus operating system here that allows for the capabilities that are unique to the data center, but build off of our core strengths of the IOS and adjust it for the data center. And you're also seeing a realization that to be successful in the future as this virtualization occurs, we have to have a very broad and very deep partner ecosystem environment.

The data center will enable the first generation of virtualization, the ability that when we have a device in our hand we'll have no idea what's stored there, where the processes are, where the application is executed. And that must first be done through intelligent networks into the data center, but over time all the way to the individual homes. It is the ability to anticipate a vision of an industry, to focus on that vision in terms of what is your sustainable differentiation, and to say what you need to do over the next 12 to 18 months to get that differentiation.

We're excited to share those details at this time with you, both today on the announcement, but you will see a constant stream of announcements and partner announcements as well over the next 12 to 24 months. Thank you for joining us on this very key announcement to the future of the data center and to the future of virtualization.

Have a great day.