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The Biggest Company in Technology?

"We think the opportunity to be the major company in communications and IT is in front of us," Cisco CEO John Chambers said this morning at Cisco's annual analyst conference. My take: it could happen, but it's going to take alot of work. IBM? Microsoft? It could take perfect execution to take down those behemoths anytime soon.

Clearly, Cisco has the opportunity to do big business in the coming months and years. The network is critical to providing the kind of experience users will soon come to expect. The Internet has made the network critical for all communication, and convergence -- read VoIP, video and mobility -- has forced more bits and more different types of bits onto networks than ever before. As Chambers has said in the past, YouTube could well be a rounding error in terms of total video load on the network in five years.

That's great news for Cisco, whose routers, switches and other devices run most networks worldwide. Anything that increases the loads and complexity of traffic on the network means more dollars in Cisco's pockets. Heck, the company already owns almost double the networking market of its next 11 largest competitors combined, at least according to a slide shown this morning. Meanwhile, Cisco's advanced technologies, which includes basically everything outside core routers and switches, continue to sell at accelerating rates.

That's not to say the industry domination path is going to be anything like easy, if Chambers actually meant it. One challenge, which Cisco still struggles with, is the perception of the company as a plumber, someone who works under the hood and behind the scenes. Ask the man on the street what Cisco does and the best answer you'll probably get is that it has something to do with the Internet. SSL VPNs, routing protocols, QoS, WAN optimization? Not exactly sexy technologies. Sure, they're critical, but they're no Windows, they're no IBM Global Services.

On the other hand, Cisco is starting to compete with the likes of Microsoft, IBM and HP in a big way in collaboration and network management technologies, among others. That means many of their current partners are slowly to become competitors. Also not helpful for building business.

I think Cisco realizes that. They're currently running a big new marketing campaign for consumers, and most conversations I have with them revolve around end user experience of applications rather than technical details and low-level features of the Integrated Services Router or the Wide-Area Application Services Engine or whatever they're pitching to me this week.

More and more, the Cisco story is about collaboration, it's about enabling applications, it's about globalization and opening new markets like physical security and digital media. All good news, but just as Chambers says the hardest companies to change are successful one, the hardest perceptions to change are long-standing ones that have grounding in reality.

Cisco, at it's core, is still the plumber, and that's not going to change anytime soon. To become number on in all of tech, I expect Cisco will need more marketing, more non-core technology offerings, continued pitches focusing on experience over technology, an even better end-to-end technology story, and a clearer software strategy.

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