Cisco's growth path

Collaboration will drive US productivity growth towards 5% per year, from current 1% to 2% levels, Cisco CEO John Chambers told the 11,000 attendees at the Cisco Live! customer conference in Orlando this week.

Cisco's own internal targets are much more aggressive, however: the company is aiming for 10% productivity growth per year for the next decade. Even that "might be too conservative," Chambers said.

This will help Cisco maintain its #1 or #2 standing in all of its key markets, Chambers says, with the goal of attaining at least 40% share in those markets. "At 20% or less, your staying power is very limited," he told the Cisco Live! crowd.

Collaboration, according to Cisco, is enabled by visual networking, unified communications, Web 2.0 technologies, wikis, blogs, social networking and the like. A key component is Cisco's TelePresence virtual conferencing system, which Chambers says saved Cisco $180 million in travel expenses in the past year.

Chambers himself say he interfaced with twice as many customers but traveled 50% less. The green impact is just as dramatic: Cisco's virtual introduction of the new ASR 1000 edge router earlier this year was 1/6 the cost of the splashy live announcement of the CRS-1 core router in May 2004, he says. Virtualizing the ASR 1000 rollout also saved 188 tons of coal and 42,000 gallons of gas, Chambers says.

"We're going to accelerate this," Chambers said. "This is the future."