Having initially identified six focus areas back in 2003 to drive future streams of revenue and growth, this number has now been expanded by a factor of five to 30 by Cisco, with the explosion of wireless and wired IP network data traffic being the common underpinning theme for all these.
Plans by the company are being made to move across these areas at previously un-attempted speeds according to John Chambers, the CEO at Cisco.
It is expected that the heart of the company’s business will remain the core business of IP infrastructure mainly routers, although what it calls the zetabyte era that will be driven by huge amounts of multimedia and data traffic being moved around is being prepared for by the company. Optical, wireless, security, storage networks, IP telephony and home networking are therefore the six directions it will be working on.
The consolidation of its lead in enterprise and consumer Wi-Fi in the Market, the selling of IP core networks to convergence carriers, 3G and 4G, initiatives into mobile broadband infrastructure using WiMAX and metro network projects will be the main areas of focus for the company’s wireless activities.
Storage and blade servers are two more areas that Cisco has now moved into. The ramping up of IP networks, which is both the key to convergence and mobile operators and the company’s lifeblood, will be supported by these two trends.
The emergence of ‘Smart-grid’ and machine-to-machine applications over IP and broadband-class connections instead of the low power, low speed M2M system that are conventionally used and cloud services that use a huge central servers to store users’ data and applications, possibly accessed securely over the internet and run by operators will be included.
A greater interest in the potential of M2M as a method of bringing higher levels of efficiency to many industries and the introduction of a new stream of revenue for carriers as the data would be travelling over their wireless networks has been sparked by public utilities in the US pushing harder for smart grids.
At an estimated value of $100 billion over the medium term, Chambers believes that the smart grid could be an even bigger market than the Internet, which Cisco already dominates.