Chambers defends email axe

Cisco's top dog tells ChannelWeb the vendor's collaboration message has not been damaged

Cisco's chief executive John Chambers has claimed exiting the "commodity" email market was the right thing to do.

He also stressed that the technology's credentials as a collaboration tool were not as good as Cisco first believed.

The networking giant announced last week that it was ceasing development of Cisco Mail. Speaking at this week's global partner get-together, Chambers told ChannelWeb that making the occasional bum call was an occupational hazard for a company with the breadth of interests of Cisco.

"If you are going to lead from and do a portfolio play, you have to be realistic when one element of that portfolio doesn't deliver," he said. "Would we take the risk if we could do it over? No. But if we get anywhere near 60 - 70 per cent of these decisions right, [we are doing well]."

Chambers stressed that the commoditisation of email would only gather pace as cloud computing takes off. He denied that Cisco's message around collaboration had been weakened.

"Customers see it as a commodity and it didn't tie into collaboration as close as we thought - particularly in the move to the cloud."