DQ Top 20:#13 Cisco Systems India

Cisco has been a company whose outlook and performance has been the indicator of the overall tech industry's health. But over the past five years the company has been battling change and the odds are stacked up high. With its mainstay businesses of enterprise networking, telco equipment, and collaboration coming under cloud and the cloud business not exactly making rain for Cisco, the company is hurting itself in the short term.

Yet, Cisco is working furiously to reinvent its leadership. Here's what it says: "Just as we combined storage, networks and servers, we are combining applications and networks at scale. We're delivering solutions-not just technology. And we are transforming our business models toward more recurring product, software and cloud revenues. We believe that in the coming days most major market transitions will be networking centric." Cisco is placing huge bets on the second coming of networking; the creation of the giant Internet of things which it calls ‘Internet of Everything'.

Cisco showed strength in a number of areas. It saw significant market traction in shipping Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)-enabled platforms, specifically the Nexus 9000, going from more than 20 customers to 175 customers, with the pipeline close to 1,000 customers worldwide. The company claims that it is the leading cloud infrastructure provider citing Synergy Research. UCS continues to cement its place as the leading platform for hybrid cloud environments, big data, and virtual desktop services, gaining market share for the 17th consecutive quarter since it was introduced. In India, Cisco has held or grown market share in 6 out of the 8 categories that it tracks, the company reveals.

24 out of the top 25 banks are on Cisco and so are the top 10 IT Services companies. 65% of mobile transactions run on Cisco's packet core infrastructure. Cisco also leads in the conditional access and digital subscription market for television reaching 40 mn homes or 200 mn viewers in the country.

The company reports strong growth in the data center market driven by demand for open and highly secure hybrid cloud environments, though numbers are not available. Cisco is trying to differentiate itself from other infrastructure companies through initiatives like Application Centric Infrastructure and Intercloud. Intercloud leverages application-centric infrastructure to deliver, together with our partners, the first global open network of clouds. We have already announced major global Intercloud partners such as Telstra. It is also the perceptible step towards IoE which the company sees as an opportunity to unlock nearly $19 tn in economic value that would accrue to the world if all things are networked.

Amongst new technology announcements, notable ones include nPower and NCS, Cisco IOx, Cisco EnergyWise, and Videoscape TV. nPower is an advanced network processor designed to power IoE and Network Convergence System (NCS), a network fabric family designed to serve as the foundation of a massively scalable, smarter and more adaptable Internet to power IoE. Cisco IOx, advances its vision of fog computing by helping businesses take advantage of the billions of devices already connected in the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco EnergyWise suite helps enterprises become more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions. Videoscape TV services delivery platform can now host new cloud video capabilities. Tata Sky in India has deployed Cisco Videoscape to enable new multiscreen viewing experiences beyond the set-top box. Tata Sky is the first platform in Asia to deploy this solution.