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Alex Zinin, Cisco's CTO for its Asia-Pacific service provider business, outlines the secret to Cisco's continued growth.
Continuous growth in a highly competitive and innovative high-tech market is a not a trivial issue, especially for a company that already has a substantial market share. On the one hand, you need to be diligent to continue to serve your customers well and help them leverage the investments they've already done with you. On the other, you need to continue to deliver innovative products and solutions and to be the industry technology and business leader.
What are the main industry trends you have capitalized on to drive growth?
Over the last five years we entered three new service provider market segments: video, mobility and cloud. We're seeing strong growth across all three, and the associated growth within our NGN architecture triggered by the traffic generated by the associated services.
Mobility is obviously the dominant theme in Asia. Increasing smartphone penetration is an additional growth multiplier. These two factors together have created new dynamics in this region that lead to hyper growth of traffic and valid concerns about monetization. With our mobile and video solutions, we are right in the middle of this process, helping service providers build scalable networks that create new services that bring customers on their network and generate new revenue streams.
We are seeing similar dynamics in the cloud segment as well. What's interesting is that cloud adoption dynamics in this region are different from other parts of the world. While the infrastructure build-outs are happening as we speak, we are helping operators build cloud services on top, and what we see is that as cloud build-outs are coinciding with rising IT and broadband penetration in the developing and emerging countries, customers are going to the cloud faster, driven by the fact they do not have to migrate from the legacy IT. We are helping our service providers create these new services, which provides us an excellent growth platform.
Finally, it is interesting to see how these new trends start to interconnect, with creation of a consumer media cloud accessible through fixed and mobile access. Cisco's portfolio fits nicely in this emerging space.