“Winning requires the right data and analytics strategy to put insight into the hands of decision makers at the right time.”
Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University computer scientists who had been instrumental in connecting computers at Stanford. Cisco is one of the largest technology companies in the world, ranking 74 on the Fortune 100, with over $51 billion in revenue and nearly 80,000 employees.
Fig 1.1 The four stages of business analytics
CHAPTER 1
1.1 Introduction to Cisco
Cisco designs and sells a broad range of technologies that power the Internet. Cisco integrates its platforms across networking, security, collaboration, applications, and the cloud. These platforms are designed to help customers manage more users, devices, and things connecting to their networks.
Fig 1.2 Sustainable data cycle of information
The strategy enables Cisco to provide customers with a highly secure, intelligent platform for their digital business. As Cisco’s customers add billions of new connections to their enterprises and as more applications move to a multi-cloud environment, the network becomes even more critical. Cisco customers are navigating change at an unprecedented pace. In this dynamic environment, their priorities are to reimagine applications, power hybrid work, transform infrastructure, and secure the enterprise. Cisco’s strategy is to help its customers connect, secure, and automate to accelerate their digital agility in a cloud-first world.
1.2 Business Model & Strategy
Cisco’s business model is centred around its networking hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment. The company’s strategic approach focuses on innovation, customer- centricity, and strategic partnerships. Data science can enhance Cisco’s business model by:
Fig 1.3 Improve the business with data science
Customers and Markets: Cisco’s customers include businesses of all sizes, public institutions, governments, and service providers, including large web scale providers. These customers often look to Cisco as a strategic partner to help them use information technology (IT) to differentiate themselves and drive positive business outcomes.
Enterprise: Enterprise businesses are large regional, national, or global organizations with multiple locations or branch offices. Many enterprise businesses have unique IT, collaboration, and networking needs within a multi-vendor environment. Cisco offers service and support packages, financing, and managed network services, primarily through Cisco’s service provider partners.
Commercial: The commercial market represents larger or midmarket and small businesses. These customers typically require the latest advanced technologies that Cisco’s enterprise customers demand, but with less complexity. Small businesses need information technologies and communications products that are easy to configure, install, and maintain.
Service Providers: Service providers offer data, voice, video, and mobile/wireless services to businesses, governments, utilities, and consumers worldwide. The service provider market includes regional, national, and international wireline carriers, web scales operators, and Internet, cable, and wireless providers. Cisco also includes media, broadcast, and content providers within Cisco’s service provider market.
Fig 1.4 Example of business performance dashboards
Public Sector: The public sector market includes federal, state, and local governments, as well as educational institution customers. Many public sector customers have unique IT, collaboration, and networking needs within a multi-vendor environment.
1.3 Branding & Experience
Cisco’s branding efforts focus on establishing the company as a leader in the technology industry. Data analytics can enhance brand perception, customer engagement, and satisfaction by:
- Analysing customer behaviour: Using data analytics to understand customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points, informing marketing strategies and improving customer
- Measuring brand sentiment: Using NLP and sentiment analysis to monitor brand sentiment, identifying areas for improvement and optimizing marketing campaigns.
- Personalizing customer experiences: Using data analytics to create personalized customer experiences, improving engagement and loyalty.
1.4 International Expansion
Cisco’s international expansion efforts focus on entering new markets and expanding its global presence. Data science can facilitate market analysis, localization, and customization of products and services for global markets
Cisco Systems International Expansion Increases Sales Revenue
- In 1993, Cisco Systems established subsidiaries in Japan and Australia, and Hong Kong. The company also established a European Technical Assistance Centre in
- In 1992, international sales accounted for only 36% of total sales, but the newly established subsidiaries helped increase international sales to 39%. Cisco Systems international strategy helped boost international sales to 42% of total sales by 1994.
The deregulation of the U.S telephone industry brought new opportunities for Cisco Systems. The company could now market its products to long-distance telephone companies that wanted to partner with a router manufacturer like Cisco Systems to expand their data communications products and services.
Fig 1.5 International Expansion
Cisco Systems entered a joint venture with MCI International to provide routers for MCI’s telephone lines. The company also signed agreements with Bell Atlantic Corp. and U.S. West Information Systems Inc. In 1993, the company signed an agreement with Pacific Bell to become the main supplier of routers for the company’s telephone networks. Cisco Systems also expanded its presence in the international telecommunications market. It entered into original equipment manufacturer agreements with multiple European telecommunications companies, including British Telecom, Alcatel, and Siemens. Furthermore, the company also expanded its market presence at home by partnering with software companies such as Novell and Microsoft Corporation.
Cisco Systems marketing strategy involved a joint venture with Microsoft to use Microsoft’s market channels to advertise its own products such as the Cisco PC-based router card. It’s also provided routers to Novell to link Novell’s Netware software network with Unix- based networks
1.5 CSR & Ethical Sourcing:
Cisco is uniquely qualified to implement analytics at the point of data, because so much of the data worldwide resides within our solutions. Our proven network expertise translates to domain expertise for hyper distributed data environments. Cisco’s powerful computing infrastructure enables you to make informed decisions using all of your data assets, whether in motion or at rest, all connected securely by Cisco’s intelligent network.
This distinct ability to compute from the data centre to the edge turns raw data into strategic business information to provide the context, information, and insight needed to fuel innovation, capture competitive advantage, and grow your business as you accelerate your digital transformation. The new wave of the Internet will disrupt and affect business. There’s only one company with the breadth and vision to guide businesses through the next wave of the Internet. Every day the world’s most innovative companies rely on Cisco’s people, technology, and experience to turn their ideas into action: action that could improve businesses in ways they don’t even anticipate today. Only Cisco delivers the intelligent infrastructure, data solutions, and analytics for the digital world.
1.6 Innovation & Product Development
In the past several decades, it has become evident that companies that deploy data as a competitive business asset are leaders within their industry. As their business evolves, companies face multiple challenges that they need to overcome. With the growing amount of data volumes, new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and big data capabilities, companies need to adapt and grow to remain relevant and continue to be leaders in their industry.
At Cisco we have a unique set of historical data that allows us to apply AI and ML techniques. We can leverage AI, ML, and deep learning to positively impact areas with high potential. Topline revenue growth solutions, which lead to increased revenue or bookings. Bottom-line cost reduction solutions, which reduce Cisco’s cost of doing business. Customer and workforce experience solutions, which enable an improved experience for Cisco’s customers or workforce. Product or service innovation, in which a new product or service or improvement is added to an existing product or service. Solutions that benefit humanity, which create tangible benefits for humanity. Furthermore, deploying AI technologies in your organization can help on multiple fronts, such as engaging better with customers, automating tasks, and gaining insights through data analytics. Given the wide range of AI’s applications, we can achieve the extraordinary within CX product management.
A virtual live 3D portfolio that automatically modifies itself based on requests from the seller (voice recognition integrated with the portfolio and roadmap). Humanoid robots that can withstand extreme environments and work in hazardous areas 24 hours a day, or aerial and underwater robots for oil and gas use cases. Artificial intelligence can help us improve our understanding of customers’ consumption patterns for IoT CX Services to optimize portfolio management and pricing and predict financial numbers. Using regression, clustering, and classification helps us to understand key parameters and relationships, leading to data-driven decisions and an understanding of customer behaviour and purchasing patterns. Additionally, we can improve operational efficiency to support the field during their sales motion. For sales enablement, machine learning algorithms will learn the sales profile of each seller-customer interaction, the performance of the seller in different product families and sub-technologies, and behavioural history.
1.7 Partnerships & Collaboration
About the Enterprise Collaboration Platform BU The Cisco ECP BU community reflects the diversity of talent required to bring new software solutions, such as WebEx Social, to market. No fewer than six different areas of expertise came together in one community and in one virtual place. The Cisco community has evolved over time, with the entire business unit invited to participate.
Cisco WebEx Social is a comprehensive collaboration platform that includes social, content, process, and communication capabilities. In WebEx Social-enabled communities, user collaboration is powered by context and is always actionable, thus improving productivity and speeding results. Groups can benefit from integrated content management and open social solutions, with future plans for embedded policy management. With a fully customizable interface, teams can easily access enterprise-level, highly available social solutions and unified communications. Each member of the team can create a linked, personalized workspace with a dashboard to facilitate role-based activities and team- and group-based communication
Cisco’s Collaboration product category consists of Cisco’s Meetings, Collaboration Devices, Calling, Contact Centre, and Communication Platform as a service offering. Cisco’s offerings within the Collaboration portfolio consist of software offerings, including perpetual licenses, subscription arrangements, and hardware.
Cisco offers end-to-end collaboration solutions that can be delivered from the cloud, on-premise, or within hybrid cloud environments allowing customers to transition their collaboration solutions from on-premise to the cloud and providing collaboration experiences that integrate people insights, relationships, and audio intelligence to help improve productivity.
1.8 Challenges & Outlook
Software development is a complex process involving program management, product management, user experience, engineering, and quality assurance teams, as well as executive oversight and leadership. Individually and as a working group, the members required streamlined collaboration processes that could help them remove challenges and meet their goals. Cisco program managers were spending an inordinate amount of a week’s time (6 to 8 hours) manually gathering team updates and communicating. Meetings then focused on verifying these updates, rather than problem solving. Cisco product managers also
were deluged with updates of a different sort: email- and meeting- driven requirements gathering, feedback from customer meetings, and input from executive review meetings. They also felt they wasted time responding to multiple, duplicate requests for the same information and updates. Because user experience (UE) design tools were not available to engineering and product development teams, the UE team was working with little transparency.
The Changing Role of Data in a Hyper-Connected World
Businesses are now focused on connecting their processes, systems, and data, both within and outside of their organization. These connections are generating massive volumes data, and the data exists in different places-from data warehouses, to the cloud to the edge. Organizations that can connect the unconnected, and leverage their data for strategic decisions in these new hyper distributed environments will lead their industry. This information, when unlocked, can be used to produce insights, experiences and better decisions, helping these companies innovate at speeds not possible before.
Business agility will be part of their DNA to foster disruptive innovation and sustainable competitive advantage. In order to effectively use their data, businesses must go beyond focusing only on the integration of these connections to focusing on connecting the right data at the right time with analytics. This ability to connect data, processes and experiences is essential for success in the new digital era.
The Cisco Connected Data and Analytics portfolio quickly gets you real-time insight from deep within your organization to the edge of your network when it’s most needed. The portfolio is a group of software offers that support architectures such as networking/infrastructures, call centres, and collaboration as well as analytics solutions to support vertical industries such as service providers, retail, manufacturing, events, and others. With the technology and insights Cisco provides, you can apply your specific business knowledge to turn discoveries into strategic actions
1.9 Conclusion
Cisco can leverage data science to drive innovation, enhance competitiveness, and achieve sustainable growth. By applying data science to its business model, strategies, and initiatives, Cisco can improve demand forecasting, enhance customer experience, and drive innovation and growth.
