Cisco Adjusts Its Business Model

Cisco is making significant changes to its business structure and operations. The company will streamline its sales, services and engineering organizations as it focuses on the five areas driving the growth of networks and the Internet: core – routing, switching, and services; collaboration; data center virtualization and cloud; video; and architectures for business transformation.

The changes announced today include:

• Worldwide Field Operations will now be organized into three geographic regions, to drive faster decision making with greater accountability and alignment. These regions include the Americas (U.S., Canada, and Latin America); Europe, Middle East and Africa; and Asia Pacific/Japan/Greater China. While the business will continue to be primarily managed by geographic regions, the organization will continue its focus on key customer segments and partners, with dedicated teams for Enterprise including large enterprise, public sector, commercial and small businesses, Service Provider, and Cisco Partners. Executive vice president Robert Lloyd will continue to lead the worldwide field operations and sales organization.
• Cisco Services will organize around key customer segments and delivery models in alignment with Field Operations. Gary Moore, executive vice president and chief operating officer, will continue as leader of the services organization, in addition to his duties as COO.
• Cisco Engineering will organize functionally to drive technology innovation, accountability and alignment across all five company priority areas. Senior vice president Pankaj Patel and senior vice president Padmasree Warrior will now co-lead the engineering organization. Within engineering, a dedicated Emerging Business Group will focus on select early-phase businesses and will be led by senior vice president Marthin De Beer, with continued focus on integrating the Medianet architecture for video across the company. The engineering organization under Patel and Warrior will continue to report to Gary Moore, COO.
• Cisco will refine its cross-functional Council structure to three councils that reinforce consistent and globally-aligned customer focus and speed to market across major areas of the business: Enterprise, Service Provider and Emerging Countries. These councils will serve to further strengthen the connection between strategy and execution across functional groups. Resource allocation and profitability targets will move to the sales and engineering leadership teams, which will have accountability and direct responsibility for business results.

The majority of these changes will take place over the next 120 days, with the new Sales organization in place at the start of Cisco’s fiscal 2012 (July 31, 2011).