Keep pulling the thread on Amazon Web Services.
The two major disruptive forces that VMware had to contend with were the rise of cloud computing and the emergence of containers and Kubernetes.
Amazon Web Services' primary disruption was making infrastructure available directly to developers without involving IT, a new user class that VMware did not know how to engage with.
Cisco's most significant strategic failure was missing the cloud computing wave.
Cisco's current product development goal is to bring a new product from concept to market in nine months and scale it to $1 billion in revenue within three to four years.
The rise of AI will cause the traditional enterprise sales channel, which targets IT departments, to become obsolete.
The adoption of autonomous AI agents will shift inference demand from being spiky to a sustained, persistent workload, exponentially increasing network capacity requirements.
Cisco's CEO Chuck Robbins, despite his sales background, has deliberately shifted the company to become a product-centric organization.
The AI wave will drive a 10x increase in the market size for infrastructure because AI applications are GDP-enhancing on a scale not seen in previous technology cycles.
The AI trend will increase the demand for infrastructure scale by a factor of 100 to 1,000, not just 10.
Cisco is pursuing a vertical integration strategy for AI, building its own silicon ASICs, network infrastructure, security platform, data platform, and observability stack.
Cisco's partnership with competitor Microsoft Teams, allowing Teams to run natively on Cisco devices, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Cisco.
In its 20-year history, VMware's first decade was characterized by disrupting the market and growing, while its second decade was defined by other companies attempting to disrupt it.