Breakaway or breakdown?
Despite the slowing economy, Chambers has argued that Cisco can still break away from its smaller competitors, which are good at niche products, but don't have the product depth Cisco does.
Chambers said during the company's analyst conference call this week that for the past seven years Cisco has maintained that the area it plays in will grow 30 percent to 50 percent each year--and that the company can maintain that growth.
Chambers has also argued that there are many emerging markets that will drive growth for Cisco, such as networking hardware that speeds content over the Web and devices that allow businesses to make phone calls over the Net.
"We can break away regardless of market inflections...Almost all the market trends are aligned for breakaway. (We are) strong end-to-end in enterprise and service providers. Many of our competitors are primarily focused on one major line of business."
Analyst Paul Johnson, of Robertson Stephens, disagrees, arguing that Cisco has lost market share to smaller competitors, such as Juniper Networks, Redback Networks and Extreme Networks. For example, in the high-speed network router market, Juniper in just two years has captured 30 percent of a market that Cisco has historically dominated to such an extent that no one even tried to compete until recently.
