Dancing Giants: How Cisco Innovates
Cisco has been called the backbone of the Internet for so long it feels like a trademarked slogan. But while much of its $49 billion in annual revenue still comes from its core business of switches and routers, the company has been busy in recent years finding new areas of business such as teleconferencing and cloud computing.
Staying relevant in a fast-evolving and hyper-competitive technology industry is tough for a company with $120 billion in market value and three decades of history (Cisco will turn 30 in December). As Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, Padmasree Warrior is tasked with helping to keep the networking company focused on new innovations.
In a recent interview with PandoDaily, Warrior discussed trends that will be driving tech innovation in coming years and how Cisco is responding to those trends. Her comments ranged from the coming marriage of engineering and design to how Cisco integrates its acquired startups, and from Cisco’s plans to expand into cloud services to lessons startups can learn from big companies (and vice versa).
How are you approaching innovation at Cisco?
Technology is changing at an amazing pace right now. Today, we have about 10 billion connected devices. We expect that number to go to about 50 billion devices by 2020. That in itself says connectivity is going to be rampant. At the same time, we know that there will be 77 billion applications that will be downloaded just in 2014. All of that suggests that the Internet is about to go through a major transformation. We think there’s an opportunity in being able to connect people, process, things and data. We call that the Internet of everything.
Keep reading Dancing Giants: How Cisco Innovates | PandoDaily.
Picture: Padmasree warrior, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer
