Cisco Gearing Up for 2009

You can tell a lot by the way a company behaves in the media. Cisco, is one of those companies which knows how to sing a tune.

It's no coincidence that Cisco has two very interesting stories appear in different parts of the media today. It was planned. What's more if you look closely at both stories you can see that the story angles are not that different. That's called positioning, and when you read the words you see that the Cisco message for 2009 is really more about pulling more of their switches through the service providers by getting more end of the line (i.e. the consumer and the business user) dependent on IP based services and features.

The New York Times story takes a very consumer tone (of course) while the CXO Today story has a more inside the technology business world perspective. Both highlight many of the same initiatives that Cisco is embarking on and draw attention to why those efforts are so important to the publics, not only the company. That's called messaging.

While Cisco may have only made four acquisitions this past year, its clear that they have focus and their Linksys and Scientific Atlanta grabs from prior years are certainly now coming to the forefront.

My guess is that in 2009 Cisco makes some moves that expands their market share immensely. They are still a darling of what's left on Wall Street, they have sales and they are very focused.