John Chambers has led Cisco into becoming too broadly spread, undisciplined and caused three quarters of poor results disappointing investors. Now he wants to turn the tide and get Cisco back on track.

The company's performance in the past three quarters has gotten Cisco to the point where Chambers has had to do something vital; changing the overall strategy.

He mentioned "It is aspects of our operational execution that are not [sound]. We have been slow to make decisions, we have had surprises where we should not, and we have lost the accountability that has been a hallmark of our ability to execute consistently for our customers and our shareholders. That is unacceptable. And it is exactly what we will attack."

Five focus areas

The company's five focus areas are laid down: "Our five company priorities are established: leadership in core routing, switching and services; collaboration; data centre virtualisation and cloud; architectures; and video."

Then Chambers goes into "tough decisions" mode: "We will take bold steps and we will make tough decisions. With change comes disruption, and you will see this necessary and healthy disruption as we make meaningful decisions in a timely, targeted and measurable way. We will address with surgical precision what we need to fix in our portfolio and what we need to better enable."