Cisco At The Tipping Point?Cisco At The Tipping Point?

Cisco CEO John Chambers took a glass-half-full approach to Wednesday's earnings report, which saw fourth-quarter profits at the networking behemoth slide 46% compared to the year-earlier period. Undaunted, Chambers issued a statement saying he saw a number of positive signs this quarter and thinks the business might be at the "tipping point," which precedes a rebound.Here's a quick recap of the numbers. Cisco 4Q sales were $8.5 billion, down 17.6% from the $10.4 billion of the year-earlier period. Net income (i.e., earnings) was $1.1 billion, compared to $2.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 -- that's the 46% drop in earnings. For Cisco's full 2009 fiscal year, which ended July 25, revenues were $36.1 billion, down 8.7% from 2008's $39.5 billion; FY2009 net income was $6.1 billion, down 23.8% from $8.1 billion in 2008.

Chambers astutely turned the discussion away from the tepid financials with a quote in the Cisco press release:

"Cisco delivered very solid quarterly and annual results in a challenging economic environment. . .," he said. "We saw a number of positive signs this quarter in the economy and in our business, especially comparing our sequential quarter-over-quarter order trends. If we continue to see these positive order trends for the next one to two quarters, we believe there is a good chance we will look back and see that the tipping point occurred in our business in Q4."

Here's the thing though: When we're talking recovery, we have to be precise about which recovery we're talking about. I'm hoping for a complete, United States-wide (indeed, a worldwide) rebound. From Chambers' perspective, that of course would be desirable, too, since a rising economic tide lifts all boats.

Yet it's not the only scenario under which Cisco succeeds. For in the absence of a broad-based rebound Cisco can still recovery. For example, in a zero-sum game, Cisco wins by taking business away from its competitors.

This seems to be precisely what Cisco (and many other companies) are planning for, at least short term. (Makes you wonder how deep and long they see the economic trough lasting. More likely, like everyone else, they just don't know.) Consider the widely reported battle between HP and Cisco, where HP has edged into networking, and Cisco has slid into server says. Plus, the two have gone head to head in telepresence.

As a result, longstanding, industry wide perceptions are changing. In the old days, when one thought about a company, one put it into a mental "bucket." For example, Microsoft went into the software bucket and Intel into semiconductors. (As for Circuit City, it kicked the bucket. . .) Cisco historically fit into this template as the networking company.

But if you peer even slightly beneath the corporate surface, today this is an overly simplistic view. As our own Global CIO guru Bob Evans noted in his recent Open Letter To John Chambers, Cisco has made 130 acquisitions since the 2001 crash.

Like most any other company nowadays, the business Cisco is really in right now is the business of finding new business. Any business. Chambers himself admitted as much in the widely read article in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. The piece, Cisco CEO John Chambers's Big Management Experiment, reports how Chambers has revamped the organization so that it's, in theory anyway, better positioned to go after 26 new business areas which he believes can reach $1 billion each.

I should add that I think the way Chambers is going about this is seriously misguided. He's replaced top-down decision-making and in its place is loading his company down with committees. There's an operating committee, 12 councils, 47 boards, and a load of working groups.

This stuff scares me, because I can see other CEOs hearing about this and saying, "Hey, if Chambers is doing this, I should do it too." Sure, turn your company into groupthink hell, where ideas get beaten into pulp of the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, so the upshot is, the business of any technology company right now is truly business, not technology. While that may be the correct way to navigate out of tough economic times, the question remains whether it's a similarly a recipe for success, post recovery.

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of information.com.