There’s a new CEO at Cisco. From July, Chuck Robbins takes over the role from John Chambers, who remains as Executive Chairman.

Robbins has been at Cisco for 17 years, was key sponsor for least two major acquisitions and leads a global sales force generating $47bn per year. So we guess he knows what he’s doing.

Slow, slow, quick quick slow

Over the last couple of years, security fears and lack of standardisation slowed the adoption of Software Defined Networking. This protected Cisco’s proprietary position and enabled it to put together a strong, open-source position. Meanwhile it surfed expertly on the virtualisation tidal wave, with a solid range of software-defined compute solutions.

Of course, Cisco has some issues. These include a complicated internal structure. Some parts of the business clearly come as something of a surprise to other parts.

Cisco’s position in infrastructure, as distinct from data, may seem like a disadvantage to some. But for me, it’s one reason to value the company.

Tasty data

I believe data centers are the Achilles heel of several internet behemoths. I think some of these companies carefully keep the net neutrality pot boiling - as a blind. They secretly fear a much more important issue: data neutrality.

They need copy after copy of your tasty, nutritious data to travel to their data centers so that apps of all kinds can digest it.

Of course, while in transit, your data is at risk. And because it gets copied repeatedly in different ways, the risk in situ increases too.

No wonder hackers circle internet data like sharks around sardines.

Investing in smarter networks

As I mentioned, Cisco substantially owns the network infrastructure over which this painful process occurs.

And as it continues to invest in software that makes networks much smarter, I really hope we see the capability of that infrastructure advance.

Perhaps to the point where we don’t need to have our data travel so far, nor be copied so often.

That could be good news for all of us.

Photo courtesy of Pixar.