Reading the tea leaves
I love Om Malik. He’s explains Cisco’s AOM strategy and calls Five Across a CMS company.
He’s pointing out that Cisco has spent $1B this year on acquisitions for their highly integrated network infrastructure and applications strategy (AOM - Applications-Oriented Networking.)
When I first saw the Linksys deal and then Scientific-Atlanta - the tea leaves were clear to me - these folks are focused on the home. Now Om points out that enterprise is also part of their vision.
In other words - Cisco ain’t going away any time soon and we’ll all be sending our bits over Cisco gear and software for a while. Its the perfect zag to all others’ zigs. Maybe its even a Cisco cloud based OS play - to compete with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Take this strategy in concurrence with the new Microsoft ‘connected’ strategy and you’ve got a world reacting to Google. Everyone is scared shitless of those dweebs in Mountain View and its causing ripple effects throughout the industry. This is probably why Macromedia and Adobe merged, why Intuit is toast, why Symantec has to keep buying, etc.
There’s no sector that’s safe from the Google juggernaut.
But its good for us. Cause along the way they have to provide open APIs to connect all the pieces of their puzzles together (whoever they are) - and we can use those hooks to mesh into their platforms.
This sort of 21st century integration is what DLAs are all about.