Inflection Point: Cisco Sets the Pace of Mobility Innovation

At Cisco, we take very seriously our ability to anticipate and catch market transitions. A few years ago, we saw a market transition that would affect our Service Provider customers in the area of Mobility. With 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi deployments rising, the world was clearly shifting from Coverage, Capacity to Services… and the importance of customer experience rising amongst operators worldwide. As a result, we set in motion a new strategy for our Service Provider Mobility Group (SPMG). The key to our strategy was to develop an architecture that would enable Service Providers to offer a differentiated experience to their customers.

Our Mobility CTO Paul Mankiewich refers to the new mobility operator requirements as “the Grand Challenge.” The inflection point is here. Not only do our key SP customers recognize it, but our competitors are also seeing the tremendous business opportunity represented by the “Grand Challenge,” especially as it relates to emerging Monetization use cases that are propelling the market’s rapid growth.

Our vision to enable new network-based value chains and our holistic, build-buy-partner portfolio management strategy are instrumental to our current Mobility leadership as well as ensuring our future advantage. The good news is that we have an architecture and end-to-end solutions that will help Service Providers deliver a differentiated experience while simplifying and automating the network, and opening it up to be more programmable. The not-so-good news for our competitors is that we have a formidable track record of capturing the #1 or #2 market share positions in our top priority segments and businesses.

Our “diamond in the rough” and one critical pillar in our overall product portfolio is the recently launched Cisco Quantum suite. With our relentless focus on customers, we are incorporating important feedback to “polish” this software diamond and change the game for SPs, in part, by helping level the playing field with their existing and potential competitors. The brilliance of Cisco Quantum is revealed by the RAN, WAN, and user session layers where we extract the intelligence from these layers in the network, analyze it and make a decision within that layer for optimization and/or monetization.

In addition to warm customer reception for the platform at Mobile World Congress, we are beginning to hear a loud chorus of applause to Cisco Quantum’s disruptive innovation from Mobility industry followers, influencers, and investors. Here are just a few media examples from the launch:

The Motley Fool: “Cisco Ready To Ride Mobile Internet Market Higher”

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has announced new product innovations to enable providers to acquire intelligence about mobile internet networks and maximize profit …

TechWeek Europe: “MWC 2013: Cisco Products Aim At Monetising ‘Data In Motion”
By Jeffrey Burt
February 25, 2013

Customers stay tuned. Competitors beware. Our steadfast execution to lead the next-generation Mobility market transition and leverage the inflection point is just beginning to heat up. Watch this space for more discussion of SPMG strategy developments and portfolio innovations in the coming weeks and months.