That brutal consolidation that Cisco CEO John Chambers keeps forecasting won’t be limited to IT vendors. It will also include their customers.
In a talk at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, Chambers said that only 1/3 of enterprises in existence today will be so “in a meaningful way” in 20 years. It’s at the 10 minute mark of this video clip.
“It’s going to be brutal, it’s going to be fast.”
Chambers said almost the same thing about IT companies a couple of months ago at his Cisco Live keynote address. There, he said only two or three of the top five IT companies would be around in the next five years.
Other remarks of note in Chamber’s talk this week at the Fortune conference:
- Had that “box” that an NSA official was allegedly tinkering with in a notorious photograph that prompted a letter to President Obama been an HP or Huawei product, “I probably would not have written to the President,” Chambers said. Chambers wrote to Obama to protest the NSA surveillance tactics and express the vital need for trust in a manufacturer’s supply chain when that photograph appeared identifying the infiltrated product as a Cisco router.
- Cisco has stated multiple times that the number of connected devices in the Internet of Things/Everything will be 50 billion by 2020; in 2030, the number of connected devices will be 500 billion, Chambers said this week. He also said the Internet of Things will be 10x to 15x the size of today’s Internet.
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