Cisco's John Chambers Offers Optimistic Outlook

Business confidence is definitely improving and enterprise customers will boost their IT spending in 2004 in single digits rates, said John Chambers, Cisco Systems' CEO, speaking at the company's annual analyst meeting in Santa Clara, California. The new spending will be tied into productivity gains, said Chambers, because he believes there is a clear correlation between networking and improved business processes. The hottest areas for spending include IP telephony, optical networking, security, storage, wireless LANs and home networking. Each of these areas, Chambers believes, will grow to be $1 billion markets for Cisco. In IP telephony, Cisco plans to continue to build its ecosystem of partners. Chambers noted that the average corporate PBX is now nine years old and that many companies will be looking for the efficiency boost of a converged network. A webcast of the event is online.
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