Cisco CEO’s mantra: Simplify the networks

Over more than three decades, Cisco Systems became a Silicon Valley giant partly because of one facet of its business: technological complexity. But that pattern can’t go on, according to Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s chief executive, who took over the company in 2015. At Cisco’s annual technology conference in Orlando, Fla., last month, he declared that technical shifts were affecting how all companies used the internet, forcing Cisco to rewrite its product playbook. “The networks that we build we’re going to have to think about fundamentally differently,” Robbins told attendees.