Mario Mazzola, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems and the company's chief development
officer, recently spoke about Cisco's pricing and its innovation efforts. Is the reputation that Cisco
products are higher-priced fair? And why do you have so many customers if that's the case? Our
approach, which has been crucial for the success of Cisco, is to look at all the different
requirements that make sense for customers. So we do consider excellence in technology
innovation as a necessary condition and also the service part of the sales engagement and the
relationship with customers as equally important. It's a global offering from Cisco, with global
service, and that is an integral part of our culture. Our products are based on a lot of reaction from
customers. I don't suggest all the innovation comes from our customers. We consider what are the
real problems and challenges they face. We try as much as possible to address customer needs.
In terms of the global cost or price of our product, obviously what is really relevant for our
customers is what is the total cost of ownership. That includes the opportunities to deploy in a
timely fashion and with obligations to overlay new services. But what about pricing of products?
We make a point in terms of our strategic process for development to look simultaneously at three
major points. And actually, the very first in importance is the price and performance. We don't want
to shy away from producing the best price/performance type of product. The second point is to
have more flexibility and more intelligence and more adaptability in our networks. The third one is
to have global architectures ... which have a long life and do not require any type of forklift
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