AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian
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INTERNET PLUMBER
COMPANY Cisco Systems, President and CEO
AGE 50
NET WORTH $200 million
ADDRESS www.cisco.com
BIO TV ads tout Cisco's dominance in carrying Internet traffic, but the company's
dramatic growth owes more to Chambers, its unassuming CEO who has been the
architect behind the growth of the data-networking giant. To sustain its gains,
Cisco must go after other networks, such as the phone system. Chambers preaches
that all voice and video will eventually migrate to an open, packet-switched
system like that used by the Internet--at the expense of old-line equipment
suppliers such as Nortel Networks and AT&T spin-off Lucent, both of which have
paid billions of dollars to snap up Cisco competitors. Even IBM, a longtime
networking player, sold off its networking patents to Cisco, becoming a parts
supplier to the newcomer. Cisco also sells the most equipment over the Net:
annual online sales have passed $10 billion.
Chambers learned his winning ways at Wang Labs, the '70s word-processing giant notorious for failing to recognize the
threat of the personal computer, and has never hesitated to buy promising
networking start-ups. Cisco's powerful stock--$100 invested in 1990 is now worth
$34,000-- lets it buy companies with such regularity that an entire Cisco
division is devoted to assimilating acquisitions. The buying spree--more than 30
companies obtained since 1993, or one almost every other month--came to a head in
August, when Cisco paid $6.9 billion for Cerent, a two-year-old company that
practices what Chambers preaches--tying voice and data over global networks.
BEST LINE "With the PC, Microsoft and Intel fundamentally changed the way people
work ... By providing the end-to-end network plumbing, we can change the way
entire companies and industries operate."
FORWARD TILT Just as IBM exits the market, other computer manufacturers like
Hewlett-Packard are eager to sell more networking gear. And Microsoft has long
wished to turn Windows NT into an OS for routers. To keep Cisco at the top,
Chambers will have to keep buying into the next wave.
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