Cisco's number one issue to face in the coming months is security.
This was the assessment made by John Chambers, chief execuitve (CEO) and chairman of Cisco, during his keynote speech at the Cisco Live event, being held in London this week.
Chambers claimed his company was at the forefront of cloud computing thanks to its dominance in the backend world of networking, but recognised security was still a barrier to adoption.
"The number one issue... is security, for my customer base and for me personally, it is the number one challenge," he said.
"There is no such thing as a secure data centre in the world [and] we need the ability to balance the openess of this social network environment with security."
The CEO claimed security needed to be built into both software and hardware in an "architectural play" but with a need for open standards, encouraging collaboration and letting "everyone play in."
Although he had no specific product announcements around this area, Chambers hinted heavily something was in the offing as his speech focused on Cisco's strategy with both research and development (R&D) and acqusitions alongside its engineering focus on security.
He said: "We are on fire in terms of R&D and we have turned out more new products in the last year and a half than we probably did in the decade before that."
Chambers revealed $5.3 billion - or 13 per cent of company revenues - had been spent on R&D, along with over $6 billion in acquisitions.
"No-one goes across the entire product range like we do," he added.
"This took us 15 years to put together. We are investing heavy in R&D [and] our innovation engine is on fire."
The underlying theme of the whole speech however was a need for for innovation but with the "operational excellence" to back it up.
"If we here in Europe don't think about how we change our productivity and drive innovation... we will get left behind," Chambers concluded.
"What is exciting is that networking is the platform."
