Cisco is not trying to compete with Google and Microsoft

Charlie Giancarlo, former senior VP, chief development officer, Cisco and
president, Linksys (a division of Cisco) is currently the managing director of
Silver Lake, a private equity firm focused solely on making large-scale
investments in leading technology companies.

As chief development officer, Charles Giancarlo reported to John Chambers
and drove the overall strategy and execution of technology development at Cisco,
the global networking leader. Giancarlo was also the driving force behind
Ciscos The Human Network vision and its Web 2.0 ambitions, which included
Ciscos foray into the consumer market, media and social networking after
acquiring WebEx Communications, Scientific Atlanta, Linksys, and Utah Street
Networks. He led a team of over 16,000 engineers in innovative and different
areas of communications technology, including emerging technologies, unified
communications, digital video, wireless networking, routing, switching,
security, storage networking, and network management. Giancarlo holds an MS
degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley
and is an MBA from Harvard.

What are some key trends in communication technologies, and Ciscos
strategy around the same?

Our strategy for a very long time has focused on creating network
environments for major customers, whether they are enterprise or service
providers. This allowed them to develop their core business around data
communications, and the Internet. As the Internet became democratized and more
capable, we started to see that it could be used for functions other than just
data communications. Also, VoIP was introduced almost a decade ago, and it has
been growing quite well.

This has enabled organizations to spread geographically, but one still had to
be organized in the traditional ways of strict lines of communication,
reporting, and so forth. The Internet allows people to collaborate and organize
without ever having to depend on another, and without any formal lines of
communications or administration. It has allowed communicating through Wi-Fi and
collaborating with things like MySpace pages. Something that we recently
introduced, Telepresence, is another form of communication that is going to be
fundamentally different. We also plan to have a consumer version of this
solution in a few years.

Charlie Giancarla former Senior VP, chief development officer, Cisco

Do you want to help drive the Internet traffic in order to boost your
networking business?

The answer is no. We do not believe in going to businesses solely to drive
our core business. We look at every business as a new opportunity. We look for a
synergistic business because if the business is not synergistic, we cannot bring
a lot of expertise to it, which means that we do not have a competitive
advantage in that area. We expect that business by itself will be very
profitable for us. But in 3-4 years, we will be known as a video business mainly
because we will be so involved in video. Our networking business will still be
the largest part of our overall business.

How is Cisco looking at Web 2.0 technologies?

As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, I think that enterprises, in particular, and
service providers will see us as a communications and collaboration company, and
Web 2.0 is just a set of technologies associated around collaboration. Companies
have identified that while the basic tools are valuable, they have not been
designed for an enterprise customer but for an end user. What they need is
enterprise class tools that, for eg, support Wiki or a tagged directory type of
environment that can have a back up or can be searched.

You have acquired the social networking company Tribe.net. What was the
motive behind this?

We would not be in the business of providing social networking services on
lines of Orkut or others; it is the technology behind it that we are getting
into. On the business side, we may take tools or capabilities that are similar
to MySpace and Facebook but drive more of business context for enterprises.

You are in the unified communication space also. How will you integrate
that into the existing set of solutions?

Unified communications is still in its infancy. The initial approach we are
going to take is with WebFx. It is a hosted solution, and we are going to
incorporate more of our unified communications capability, improving voice,
video, and some other applications in that environment. At the same time, we are
also going to take some of the WebEx capabilities and drive it into the unified
communications solution to allow customers to move to collaborative application
environment with partners. We can also see enterprises wanting to host a WebEx
type of capability rather going through a third party. We also believe that the
integration of voice and the desktop might be much tighter than it is today.

How are you placed in your Linksys line of business?

I think of what Linksys and Scientific Atlanta do in terms of a connected
home environment. Yes, we made two different acquisitions in the space, but we
really look at the connected home environment as a major opportunity. Obviously,
the way we look at the connected home is in the ability to bring not only video
entertainment but other forms of entertainment into homes, whereby it is
inexpensive and easy to use by the consumer.

Considering that prices of most electronic devices are going down, what
kind of business do you see there?

Prices go down, but the consumer electronics business goes up. It is the way
of the world. It has been very good business for us so far. We tripled the
Linksys business. The Scientific Atlanta business grew 30% a year in 2006. We
expect continuing growth. It is an environment where the delivery of broadband
is increasingly tied to the delivery of entertainment because most consumers
will pay for entertainment. We can play a very big role in making that happen.

What is the common ground between companies like Cisco and Google?

I spend more of my time trying to figure out how not to compete with
Microsoft and Google because I would rather compete with easier competitors. We
are looking for new opportunities and a chance to define our opportunity, rather
have it defined for us. I think it is unclear at this point who are going to be
the dominant force in that environment but our strength in networking would help
us. I dont want to compete with Google or Microsoft. I would rather not.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in