Over the past two years CEO Chuck Robbins has reorganized Cisco, from top management to business focus and how its workforce is organized. The bottom line: Its stock has surged to nearly $40 a share – up by more than 50 percent – under his direction. So how has the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate pulled this off?

Cisco

Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research who provides tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate, cites several reasons in a post published at Network World.

“A hefty amount of my business comes from my interactions with Wall Street, and two years ago, very few wanted to talk about Cisco,” he wrote. “There were far more bears than bulls, and the feeling was that the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and other trends would slowly eat away at Cisco and it would go the way of Lucent, Nortel and so many other companies that were too stubborn to change their business models.”

Kerravala cites five key points in praising what he calls Robbins’ “good, old-fashioned leadership and making the right decisions.”

  • Doing what’s right for customers instead of what appears to be best for Cisco.
  • Acquisitions, acquisitions and more acquisitions.
  • Embracing the cloud.
  • Going all in on artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Read the full post online.

Cisco employs several thousand people at its campus in Research Triangle Park.