Cisco boss slates rivals in earnings swan song
Outgoing Cisco boss talks deer encounters, the next 'revolution' in the internet and HP and VMware during final quarterly conference call
HP, VMware and software-defined networking all got it in the neck from an impassioned Cisco chief executive John Chambers on his final earnings call before he bows out.
During a call with analysts following Cisco's Q3 results, Chambers was at times almost poetical as he reflected on his 20 years in the hotseat, told an anecdote about an encounter with a deer and stressed he will act only as "wingman" to CEO designate, Chuck Robbins, when he steps back to the post of executive chairman in July.
"So let me first say it very crisply. Chuck is the CEO, period. He will make the decisions. I will be an advisor to him and I'll be very involved where he wants me to be," Chambers said.
Cisco had a "solid" Q3, Chambers said, with overall sales up five per cent year on year to $12.1bn and sales of its core switching products rising six per cent, which he described as "off the charts".
"All this garbage about new players coming in and software coming in and white label killing our approach was entirely wrong," Chambers said, referring to predictions that the rise of software-defined networking would wipe Cisco's switching business off the map.
Chambers said predictions he made at a sales meeting eight months ago, that half of Cisco's key competitors - which include HP, Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, VMware and Avaya - would not exist in a meaningful way as competitors to it in a year, are already starting to bear out. Presumably referring to HP and VMware/EMC, respectively, Chambers questioned what "breaking a company in half and having to roll the dice of combining two companies that are really five companies into one" would mean for innovation.
During a call in which he admitted he would break a couple of his "golden rules" with his unusually candid comments, Chambers also reflected on Cisco's evolution. He compared the rise of the Internet of Everything [IoE] to the first ‘revolution' of the internet back in the late 1990s.
"[IoE] will be much bigger than the last, and it will require everything to become digital. At the time, almost no one understood what we saw. Today, it's everyone's idea," he said.
Chambers said it had been a "tremendous honour" to lead Cisco and predicted the firm would "do better after me than during my time". He said he planned to "enjoy the moment", something an encounter with a deer while he was out running that morning had reinforced.
"I got stopped in the first half mile," Chambers said on the call, a transcript of which can be found here. "I'd never seen this before in my life, but the biggest buck I've never seen. It was probably a 12 point, maybe 14 point. It was right in my path 10 feet from me. And I looked it right in the eyes and at first I was annoyed because I was trying to set my timing. And then I realised you want to enjoy the moment and how special that was."