The first thing that comes to your mind when you visit the new Cisco.com is WoW!

What a way to reinvent a company…a company that was seen as a ‘hard’ and lying in the background is now attempting a transformation itself into a ‘soft’ company. Cisco calls itself a company that is making possible the next gen network, a network of people–The Human Network. A neat thought to energize the company’s next lap.

When you look at a section in the web site where people all over the world post stories as to how the omnipresent network helped them, you begin to wonder if you were part of a social networking site. Well, Cisco sure does wants you to believe that and may be more. Take a look at this snippet from its annual report.

Does it mean it will stop making the hardware and the related networking enabling components. Obviously not. It just lifts itself from the hardware/software level to solutions level aligning itself with the social aspect of internet, and Web 2.0.

And Cisco wants to go wherever the human network goes.

“To Cisco, vision means the ability to broadly anticipate how the
communications and IT market will evolve and understand how
the network drives this evolution. We believe the network will
change the way the world works, lives, plays, and learns, and
that the network will have intelligence distributed throughout it.
We see, as the market plays out, that the network will literally
become the platform for all of life’s experiences by delivering
applications and services to our customers and by enabling
greater productivity, new business models, and expanded forms
of entertainment.”
John Chambers and John Morgridge in their letter to Cisco’s shareholders.

Related links
Cisco
Letter to Shareholders