Geek of the Week: Chuck Robbins
Let’s jump right into it this week. Congratulations to Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco! There were a few factors that gave Mr. Robbins the win this week. Let’s take a look at why this award was given to him.
In the age of everything digital, voice and video are huge parts of our lives. Though Cisco primarily focuses on being a hardware provider, the natural shift was to the cloud. That’s where Cisco’s Spark comes into play.
Now, some of you may be wondering: doesn’t Cisco already operate something like this called WebEx? Well, as we pointed out, yes and no. While WebEx is a robust meeting platform that is hosted by the cloud, WebEx doesn’t provide Skype like functionalities. It isn’t really practically for two end users to jump on WebEx each and every time they need to talk. That being said, WebEx is Cisco’s hottest business product with revenues recently eclipsing $1.12 billion. And that’s exactly what people are expecting Spark to be: like Skype.
So what made Cisco enter this space, especially if their focus is on hardware? Cisco says that their entrance into the cloud hosted telecommunication arena was a direct result of customer feedback. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, recently mentioned that customers want to manage less hardware and shift their workloads into solutions that are offered as a service.
As for Mr. Robbins: he began his career as an application developer and has actually been at Cisco for most of his professional career (in various positions of course). Before Cisco, he held positions at Wellfleet Communications and NCNB as an (aforementioned) application developer. He holds a B.S.c. in Mathematical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also been named as a top 100 channel executive of the year by VARBusiness.
Congratulations Chuck!
