SAN JOSE—Cisco Systems Inc. wants to be more of a systems provider and less of a parts shop.
To that end, the networking vendor of late is taking a holistic approach to its products and the way it sells them, with integration of advanced services functions into its switches and routers, a new tool designed to help make the business case for buying into those functions, and a stronger focus on vertical business applications.
Whether its story is resonating with information technology executives is not yet clear. Nevertheless, Cisco executives made their case to eWEEK in a series of interviews this week.
Cisco last month launched the architectural framework for its Intelligent Information Network strategy with the debut of its Service-Oriented Network Architecture—an effort to raise its stature in the eyes of enterprise IT executives from that of a network box or plumbing provider to a systems solution vendor, and the company is taking that strategy to all of its business units.