Video is Huge

“We believe that video is the next voice, the next data. We started with that premise seven years ago,” Chambers said. “The market transition is going to take place whether we want it to, or not.” He characterized Cisco’s bet on video-centric networking as a potentially substantial risk—one that he was not only more than willing to take, but whose underlying technology had been under development within Cisco for years.

He added: “I think one of the important things to remember as an IT administrator or business leader is that transitions wait for no one.”

Don’t Fight Consumer IT devices in the Enterprise.

Chambers also focused on businesses’ need to incorporate a wide variety of consumer devices within IT infrastructure—and to wrestle with the resulting security and reliability issues. Cisco itself has “tried to limit devices,” Chambers said, but “it became very obvious four years ago that we wouldn’t be able to do that.” That apparently helped to develop Cisco’s current vision of providing network intelligence and tools capable of delivering content to users anywhere on any device, anywhere in the world. Deploying that network, in turn, involves advances in cloud, virtualization and other technology.

Beware of the Incumbents

Echoing the previous day’s keynote comments by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, who suggested that large IT vendors have an interest in maintaining outdated paradigms, Chambers said that the transition to the cloud was something resisted by “the incumbent players” who “have very little interest in having this occur, because you sell [fewer] servers, less storage.”