"Cisco is becoming increasingly a consultant for how an Internet-based strategy can be deployed"

Cisco's Asia operations comprises Hong Kong, India, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Based in Singapore, Gary Jackson has responsibility for one of Cisco's fastest growing regions worldwide. Gary is confident that the India operation will continue to grow at its current rate of over 100 percent. And believes that Chambers presence could make a difference on the operation's fortunes as well as the development of India as a new economy. He provides us a glimpse of how the Cisco team members perceive their company's success. 

How is Cisco Systems different from other companies?

Cisco Systems' foundations were built on the twin platforms of education and the Internet. The founders of Cisco were two computer scientists from the University of Stanford in California who built the first multiprotocol router that enabled different computer networks to talk to each other. This was really the catalyst for the rapid expansion of ARPANET into what is the global Internet today. Well over 80 percent of all Internet traffic travels through Cisco's equipment. Till today, Cisco's entrepreneurial spirit and historical underpinnings in the Internet and education still imbues the company, despite the fact that we are a much bigger company than what we was, when we first shipped product in 1986. Our success has also been due to the fact that we eat, live, and breathe customer service, and this, too, was cultivated by our founders. 

John Chambers, our president and CEO since 1995, was instrumental in keeping those cultural attributes alive, which typically work best in a small company, while growing the company at rates of between 55 to 60 percent. 

Cisco's technology and solution range today go beyond just routers of course and we are constantly working to build next-generation products for service providers, enterprises, and small and medium businesses. Our acquisition strategy has been key in our ability to keep ahead of the technology curve but we also are a big investor in R&D with about 13 percent of our annual revenues going into internal product development. Our biggest R&D center outside the US is in fact in India, in
Bangalore.

Chambers' and Cisco's vision is to really enable high-speed Internet access to anyone, anywhere, so likewise our product strategies run the gamut of providing IP+Optical networking equipment to service providers to build the backbone of the worldwide communications infrastructure to end-user broadband equipment for the small and medium business. Being a firm believer in technology agnosticism, Cisco is working with all available technologies from DSL to cable to wireless, as long as the end goal is achieved.

Another big differentiator for Cisco has been our whole-hearted adoption of Internet business solutions. We not only produce Internet solutions, we also use them. Over 90 percent of our business is conducted through the Internet, while 80 percent of all customer enquiries are handled via our website without the need for a Cisco employee's intervention. Everything from human resources to finance to our supply-chain management is done over the Internet and the Cisco intranet and extranet.

We believe this is the new model for all businesses and we have built a wide-ranging Ecosystem of technology partners, manufacturing suppliers, and channels that enables Cisco to deliver the best solutions custom-tailored to a specific customer's requirements.

This is a value proposition that is unmatched in the industry today.



Cisco Systems is seen as a technology partner and not a business partner-Comment.

Cisco's core business is certainly providing leading-edge Internet solutions but increasingly, Cisco's own experience in using the Internet has turned us into a best-practice proponent. Whenever Chambers travels around the world, he meets with government and business leaders to share with them the lessons that Cisco has learnt and how using the Internet as extensively as Cisco does can turn into tremendous competitive advantages. The Internet is truly the Network of Networks which will serve most of the communication requirements of humans worldwide so companies or countries that do not embrace it now will be left very far behind. So in a sense, Cisco is becoming increasingly a consultant for how an Internet-based strategy can be deployed in a company. Look at how quickly Singapore has embraced the Internet and what a force it has become despite having only 3 million people. That strategy partly came about after Chambers met with Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and other key government leaders in 1998.

What makes Cisco Systems so successful?

You can perhaps summarize all our Cisco's virtues by looking at the Cisco Culture card that every employee carries with him or her:

"Customer Success as the foundation for attributes that include quality teamwork; technology agnosticism; empowerment; individual integrity; frugality; open communications; and a single-minded goal towards driving change. The Internet is changing the way we work, live, play and learn and every Cisco employee believes in his or her role in being an agent of that change". 

Nareshchandra Laishram