Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins Outlines Strategy for Connected World

He’s been Cisco’s CEO for a little over 5 months now, since taking over for John Chambers, and Chuck Robbins hasn’t been sitting on his heels.

At the recent Global Editor’s Conference (GEC) at the company’s San Jose headquarters, the company’s leader told the invited group of journalists from all over the world, including little ol’ me, that Cisco is strong and now will use that strength to build a partnership-type economy and help facilitate growth throughout the IT, IoT and OT worlds. 

“I am incredibly bullish about where we are,” Robbins said. “Today, IT teams are shifting what they care about. Our customers are thinking about how technology fundamentally defines strategy.”

That means, he said, that all of the coming interconnected devices in the IoT will be an opportunity for Cisco and its partner ecosystem. He said that 40 percent of IP mobile traffic will be for M2M device connectivity sooner rather than later, according to Cisco’s research.

“I believe this is bigger than the first wave of the Internet,” Robbins said. “It has to be. We’re on the front end of something that is big.”

He laid out a few key areas of development upon which will hang the future IoT infrastructure. Applications will be the home of the big data insights that come from the edge devices, and he said Cisco is going to work to let those device applications do what they need to do. Another important avenue will be in intelligent infrastructure because building a smarter world, he said, will give customers a better opportunity for positive business outcomes.

That’s not all, however. Oh, no. No small visions for Cisco.

“You’ll see us active in any area we need to be [in order to] accomplish our objectives for our customers,” Robbins said. The secret to future innovation and success at Cisco will be the pairing of speed and scale. “I believe we need to be faster, faster, faster, faster.”

He outlined the approach for the future in three parts: Simplicity, Clarity, Speed. Every solution and innovation designed by Cisco will be done with those three goals at front of mind. The way to accomplishing consistently those goals comes at the end of a four step path. Those four steps are: focusing on customers’ needs, ruthlessness in leading market transitions, relentless speed in innovation and competitive intensity in all pursuits.

“We do believe that this will be the strategic formula that will make us succeed,” Robbins said. “We’re going to move with speed internally so we can standardize, automate and digitize and be the example for our customers in the next decade, like we were in the ‘90s.”

Robbins’ message was clear. There is a sea change happening in technology and it’s the IoT. And he means for Cisco to be in the lead. “I really feel like we’re on the verge of something huge,” he said.

And we think he’s right.

Click here to watch the full keynote.