1. How is building a brand in a business-to-business context different from doing so in the consumer market?
2. Is Cisco’s plan to reach out to consumers a viableone? Why or why not?

Cisco Case study
Cisco they design, Manufacture, and sell internet protocol (IP) based networking and other products related to the communication and information technology (IT) industry and provide services associated with these products and their use. Cisco also provides a broad line of products for transportation data, voice, and video within buildings, across campuses, and around the world. Their products are installed at enterprise business, public institutions, telecommunications companies and other services providers, commercial businesses, and personal residences.
Cisco conducts their business globally and manages their business by geography. As they strive for faster decision making with greater accountability and alignment to support they emerging countries and five foundational priorities, as discusses later, beginning in fiscal 2012, they organized their business into the following three geographic segment:
- The Americas
- Europe, Middle East, the Africa (“EMEA”)
- Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (“APJC”)
IN Fiscal 2011, Cisco organized their business into four segments:
- United states and Canada
- European Markets
- Emerging Markets (eastern Europe, Latin America, the middle east and Africa and Russia and the commonwealth of independent states)
- Asia Pacific Markets

As part of Cisco business focus on the network as platform for all forms of communications and IT, their products and services are designed to help their customers use technology to address their business imperatives and opportunities – improving productivity and user experience, reducing costs, and gaining a competitive advantage – and to help them connect more effectively with their key stakeholders, including their customers, prospects, business partners, suppliers, and employees. Cisco delivers networking products and solutions that designed to simplify and secure customers network infrastructures. They also deliver products and solutions that leverage the network to most effectively address market transitions and customer requirements – including in recent periods, virtualization, cloud, collaboration, and video. They believe that integrating multiple network services into across their products helps their reduce their operational complexity, increase their agility and reduce their total cost of network ownership. As a result of the re-categorization of their product offerings in fiscal 2012, their products and technologies are grouped into the following categories:
- Switching
- Next- Generation network
- Routing
- Collaboration
- Service provider video
- Wireless
- Security
- Data center
- Other products
In Fiscal 2011, their products and technologies categories consisted:
- Routing
- Switching
- New products
- Other products

Network architectures, built on core routing and switching technologies, are evolving to accommodate the demands of increasing numbers of users, network applications and new network – related markets. These new markets are natural extension of their core business and have emerged as the network become the platform for provisioning, integrating and delivering an ever-increasing array of IT-based products and services.

Strategy and Focus Area
Cisco began in fiscal 2011, and had largely completed by the end of fiscal 2012, realigning their sales, services and engineering organization in order to simplify their operating model, drive faster innovation, focus on their five foundation priorities:
- Leadership in core business (routing, switching, and associated services) which includes comprehensive security and mobility solutions.
- Collaboration
- Data center virtualization and cloud
- Video
- Architectures for business transformation
They believe that focusing on these priorities best positions them to continue to expand their share of their customers information technology spending.
They continue to undergo product transaction in their core business, including the introduction of next-generation products with higher price performance and architectural advantages compared with both prior generation of products and the product offerings of our competitors. Cisco believes that many of these product transitions are gaining momentum based on the strong year-over-year product revenue growth across these next-generation product families. They believe that the strategy and their ability to innovate and execute may enable cisco to improve their relative competitive position in many of their product areas even in uncertain or difficult business conditions and therefor may continue to provide them with long-term growth opportunities. However, they believe that these newly introduced products may continue to negatively impact product gross margins, which they are currently striving to address through various initiatives including value engineering, effective supply chain management, and delivering greater customer value through offers that include hardware, software, and services.
They continue to seek to capitalize on market transitions,