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Cisco’s Seven-Year Tech Transformation – What it Means for the Future of Enterprise Networking
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Cisco’s Seven-Year Tech Transformation
Cisco’s has been working on a seven-year tech transformation, and it’s finally starting to pay off. The company has been streamlining its product line, getting out of businesses that don’t make sense, and making acquisitions to expand its portfolio. As a result, Cisco is now in a much better position to compete in the market and win over customers. In this article, we’ll take a look at Cisco’s journey and what it means for the company’s future.
Cisco’s history
Cisco’s history is long and distinguished. The company was founded in 1984 by a group of computer scientists from Stanford University. Since then, Cisco has become a global leader in networking and communications technology.
Cisco’s seven-year tech transformation began in 2007, when the company embarked on a journey to become a software-centric organization. This transformation was driven by the need to adapt to the changing demands of the marketplace and to meet the needs of our customers.
Today, Cisco is a leading provider of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. SDN allows network operators to manage their networks more efficiently and adapt to changing conditions more quickly. Cisco’s SDN solutions are helping customers around the world to build more agile networks that can quickly adapt to changing business needs.
The need for transformation
In today’s rapidly changing technology landscape, companies must continually adapt or risk becoming obsolete. For Cisco, a leading provider of networking and communications products, this has meant undergoing a massive seven-year tech transformation.
Cisco’s journey began in 2008, when the company realized that it was losing ground to nimbler competitors. Its response was to launch a sweeping initiative to modernize its technology infrastructure and move away from traditional product development models.
The transformation has not been easy, but it has been necessary for Cisco to stay ahead of the curve. Here are some of the key changes that Cisco has made over the past seven years:
-A shift to cloud-based products and services: In the past, Cisco’s products were primarily hardware-based. Today, the company offers a range of cloud-based products and services, such as its WebEx collaboration platform and its Meraki cloud-managed networking solution.
-A move towards software-defined networking (SDN): SDN is a new approach to networking that allows network administrators to manage network resources more efficiently. Cisco has been a leading player in the SDN space, with its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution.
-An increased focus on security: As the threats to network security have become more sophisticated, Cisco has beefed up its security offerings, with products such as its Firepower Next Generation Firewall (NGFW).
-A transformation of its go-to-market strategy: In order to better meet the needs of customers, Cisco has overhauled its go-to-market strategy, moving from a product-centric approach to a more customer-centric one.
Cisco’s transformation is ongoing, but the company is already reaping the benefits of its efforts. It is now better positioned than ever before to compete in the ever-changing tech landscape.
The transformation process
Cisco’s journey to the cloud started in 2012 with a shift in strategy. The company decided to move away from its traditional business of selling routers and switches and focus on software-defined networking (SDN), which allows for more flexibility in how networks are designed and operated.
To make this transition, Cisco embarked on a seven-year tech transformation process that included spinning off its hardware business, acquiring SDN startups, and investing in new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Today, Cisco is a different company than it was seven years ago. It’s now a leader in SDN and has developed several new products that leverage AI and machine learning. Cisco’s transformation is an ongoing journey, but it has already made significant progress in becoming a cloud-first company.
The Benefits of Transformation
Transformation can be a great way to improve your company’s performance. Cisco, a tech company, decided to go through a seven-year transformation and it proved to be successful. The company’s stock rose and it saved billions of dollars. Transformation can help companies improve their products, services, and operations.
Improved customer experience
Cisco’s tech transformation has vastly improved the customer experience by simplifying the company’s product portfolio, increasing engineering agility, and reducing time to market for new products. The result is that Cisco can now deliver the most innovative and customer-centric products in the market.
Improved employee experience
Cisco’s workforce is more diverse and geographically dispersed than ever before, so providing a consistent and engaging employee experience is more important than ever. We’ve made significant investments in our employee experience, including refreshed office spaces, flexible working arrangements, enhanced collaboration tools, and more. These investments have paid off, with our employee engagement scores reaching an all-time high in 2019.
Improved financial performance
Cisco’s seven-year tech transformation has led to improved financial performance, including revenue and earnings growth, increased margins, and return of capital to shareholders. The company has also delivered shareholder value through share repurchases and dividends.
Since Cisco began its journey to becoming a software-centric company, it has delivered annual revenue growth of 7 percent and earnings per share (EPS) growth of 10 percent. In addition, Cisco’s operating margin has expanded by 200 basis points, and the company has generated more than $60 billion in cash flow from operations.
Cisco has used this cash flow to repurchase approximately $43 billion of its own stock and pay out more than $13 billion in dividends to shareholders. As a result of these efforts, Cisco’s shares have outperformed the S&P 500 Index by more than 30 percent since the start of fiscal year 2013.
The Challenges of Transformation
Transforming a company’s technology infrastructure is no small feat. It can be a costly and time-consuming process with no guarantee of success. Cisco, one of the world’s largest networking companies, embarked on a seven-year transformation of its technology infrastructure in 2013. The goal was to provide Cisco’s employees with the best possible tools and services to do their jobs. The transformation was not without its challenges, but Cisco was ultimately successful in creating a more agile and efficient company.
Implementation
During the first two years of the initiative, from 2010 to 2012, we completed a lot of the easy transformations, such as consolidating data centers, automating manual processes, and thin provisioning storage. We also did a fair amount of work on adopting new technologies in the data center, such as unified computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and private clouds. But we quickly realized that if we wanted to complete our transformation journey and emerge as a best-in-class IT organization, we would have to do more than just adopt new technologies—we would have to radically change the way we worked.
We started by instituting what we call “ITIL lite.” ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices for IT service management that is used by many large organizations. While we didn’t want to implement all of ITIL, we borrowed some key concepts, such as incident management and problem management, to improve our service levels. We also developed a comprehensive set of service-level agreements (SLAs) with our business partners. These SLAs define in detail what services they can expect from IT and at what levels of quality.
To further improve service levels, we adopted an enterprise request-management tool called ServiceNow. This tool enables our business partners to log all their requests—for new services, changes to existing services, or incidents—in one place. It also gives them visibility into the status of their requests at all times. And it allows us to track and measure our performance against our SLAs in a very granular way. ServiceNow has been a game changer for us; it has helped us increase first-time fix rates by 20 percent and reduce incident resolution time by 30 percent.
Change management
Cisco’s Seven-Year Tech Transformation – Cisco realized that in order to stay relevant, they needed to make a number of changes. But effecting change in a large company is no small feat. Here’s how they did it.
It would be hard to overestimate the scale of Cisco’s tech transformation. The company has been through seven years of change, touching every aspect of the business. It has reinvented its product line, its go-to-market strategy, its culture, and even the way it designs and builds products. The transformation is not yet complete—Cisco still has plenty of room to grow—but it has already made the company leaner, faster, and more customer focused.
The journey started with a recognition that Cisco was struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the tech industry “We were behind in terms of our technology, we were behind in terms of our go-to-market model, and we were behind in terms of our culture,” says Chuck Robbins, who became CEO in 2015. Robbins set out to right the ship with a three-part plan: make Cisco’s products more software driven; move from a product-centric to a customer-centric go-to market; and build a more innovative culture throughout the organization.
On the product front, Robbins acquired a number of software companies and invested heavily in Cisco’s own software development capabilities. He also streamlined Cisco’s product portfolio from 170 products down to just 30 core offerings. This helped simplify Cisco’s go-to-market strategy and made it easier for customers to buy Cisco products.”
The Future of Transformation
Cisco’s seven-year tech transformation has been a journey of many firsts. The company has reinvented its networking hardware and software, go-to-market strategy, and even its culture. As a result, Cisco is now a leader in the software-defined networking (SDN) and application-centric infrastructure (ACI) markets.
continued improvement
However, Cisco is not resting on its laurels. The company has embarked on a seven-year journey to continue its digital transformation with the goal of becoming even more customer-centric, agile, and innovative. This next phase of Cisco’s journey is focused on four key areas:
-Putting the customer at the center of everything we do
-Building an agile organization
-Driving innovation at scale
-Investing in our people
expanding the transformation
Cisco’s massive seven-year tech transformation is coming to an end, and the company is now looking to the future.
Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kevin Bloch revealed that the company is planning to expand its transformation efforts beyond just technology. Cisco will now focus on culture, talent, and leadership as it looks to further its position as a top technology innovator.
Cisco’s transformation has been successful so far, with the company posting strong financial results and becoming a leading player in the fast-growing internet of things (IoT) market. However, Bloch admitted that there is still more work to be done if Cisco is to maintain its edge in the tech world
The expansion of Cisco’s transformation efforts will be led by new CTO David Goeckeler, who Bloch praised as “one of the most talented engineers” he has ever worked with. Goeckeler will be tasked with driving innovation across all areas of Cisco’s business, from product development to go-to-market strategies.
Under Goeckeler’s leadership, Cisco will continue to invest in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and edge computing. The company will also double down on its efforts to build an ecosystem of partners and developers that can create applications for its growing portfolio of products and services.
Bloch believes that Cisco is well-positioned for the future and that its transformation efforts will help it stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly changing tech landscape.
