¶ … Senior Management Teams
Changes to Senior Management Teams
CEOs of Cisco Systems & Competitors
John Chambers -- Cisco. In 1991, Chambers joined Cisco Systems as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations. Promoted to President and CEO in 1995, Chambers helped grow the firm to its present size. Before joining Cisco, he worked at Wang Laboratories from 1982 until 190, and prior to that, Chambers worked at IBM from 1976 to 1982. Under his leadership, Cisco and Chambers have earned all the requisite awards from Fortune 500, Forbes, CEO Magazine, Barron's, Business Week, and Time Magazine. Chambers has been visible in a variety of philanthropic arenas (Cisco Website, 2011).
Ben Verwaayen -- Alcatel-Lucent. Verwaayen is a Dutch national and an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau, an Honorary Knight of the British Empire (KBE), and a Chevalier de la Legion'd 'Honneur. He began working at Lucent in 1997 and worked his way up to Vice Chairman of the Management Board. Prior to joining Lucent, Ben Verwaayen was President and Managing Director of KPN in the Netherlands for nine years prior to joining Lucent. He was a member of the BT Board of Director before he became CEO in 2002. He left BT in 2008, having become Chairman of the Board's Operating Committee (Alcatel-Lucent Website, 2011).
Leo Apotheker -- Hewlett-Packard. Apotheker joined HP as President and CEO in 2010. Prior to joining HP, he was CEO of SAP and a member of the executive board from 2002. Apotheker was at SAP for 20 years and helped to build it into one of the leading providers of enterprise software. From 1992 until 1994, he was the founding President and COO of ECsoftBV, a large European venture capital firm. A German by birth, he is fluent in English, Dutch, French, German and Hebrew and was awarded the French Legion d'honneur in 2007 (Hewlett-Packard Website, 2011).
Future Corporate Initiatives
Cisco. Cisco has confounded investors with its seeming loss of focus on core business. The enterprise seems to be giving research and development its lead and video chatting is likely to move to center. Competitors HP, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper are grabbing market share in their core markets of routers and switching. Cisco recently did a product launch of a router completely online -- by this, they seem to be signaling the market that they will be increasingly a presence on the Web (Yahoo Finance, 2011).
Alcatel-Lucent. Data center switching is on the verge of becoming a core business for Alcatel-Lucent. With its strong foundation in telecommunications, this is a natural extension that will provide businesses with cloud-like networking for virtual transactions (Yahoo Finance, 2011). Bell Labs is part of the Alcatel-Lucent enterprise and they have contributed their legacy in communications systems. Their explorations with the mobile gateway router indicate that they anticipate a strong part in the development of the 4G/LTE environment.
Hewlett-Packard. HP is expanding into emerging markets, and with their enterprise focused on serving businesses, they are likely to go target the business segments in developing countries. It is reasonable to expect expansion in countries with prospects for strong software and platform development. HP is likely to increasingly press into the cloud-computing arena -- shifting away from hardware to the Web will improve competitive positioning. In fact, Apotheker announced that HP will continue to develop its webOS platform with planned launches of TouchPad tablet and smartphones running on the connectivity platform. Given Apotheker's long experience with SAP, this is a logical move (Yahoo Finance, 2011).
Transitions and Corporate health
Cisco. The average tenure of 59 of Cisco's 61 executives is 11.5 years. At the height of the technology boom, Cisco's market cap was in excess of $500 billion; in 2009, it had dropped to about $108.03 billion (Bright Hub, 2011). Cisco is a mature company and seems to be resting on its laurels. The consistent reliability of well-tested gear brings some customers back who have tried equipment from younger firms. However, even HP is beating Cisco on price, giving 20% discounts...
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