"Last week, I was in a meeting with [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella and President Obama, and the president of Indonesia asked us about his data center strategy," said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in a group interview at Mobile World Congress. "How does tech change business models? The speed of the market will determine both the leaders, and those who won't survive."
Robbins said that technology is now so core to the strategies of corporations and countries that they will "continue to spend no matter what, for IT deployment that fundamentally changes their business, or security deployment."
To this end, Cisco announced in a statement that it "will begin collaborating with Ericsson and Intel to develop and trial what is expected to be the industry’s first 5G router. As members of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, Cisco, Ericsson and Intel are partnering with Verizon within an ecosystem to accelerate the pace of critical 5G innovations."
"The companies expect the next-generation 5G router to enable business and residential customers to achieve significantly faster networking speeds, lower latency, and the ability to handle exponentially more Internet-connected devices," said the statement. "This advancement is intended to help accommodate the expected explosion of the Internet of Everything, and the streaming of high-definition video content."
Robbins said the advance of technology (spanning network evolution, smart cities and the Cisco-coined "Internet of Everything") is "catching bullets in your teeth. It's like someone tosses you a bullet, then pulls out a gun and says: 'this one's coming a little bit faster'. Few companies can deal with these changes at scale."