At Cisco, Advisory Services Finds a Home

EDS veteran Gary Moore today overseas one of the tech world's  busiest services technology intersections.

CM: How does Cisco view its services business? Is it a revenue producer or an enabler?

Moore: I think it's important to understand that Cisco offers services not because we're trying to build a services business, but really to align to our products strategy and to accelerate the success of our customers with our technology. And we've got a lot of ways that we do that. The services strategy overall is set up to align to the product strategy. Most companies move into services because their products are not doing well and they want more revenue. We do it really to make sure that our products get used quickly and most effectively so that we can accelerate the return on the investment that customers are making. We also try to do this from a services point of view. My organization's called Advanced Services, and I also have a group called Advisory Services. And they try to lead the experience of the interaction with the customers. And it's really the top customers we focus on, so basically the top 150. CM: What exactly do the consultants belonging to your Advisory Services business do? Moore: Advisory Services is really helping customers to prepare and plan. And so they do a lot of program management, helping customers actually take a vision that they have, put some meat around it, and then bring the business architecture, the technology architecture together, and to this platform that we call The Network as a Platform. Basically, what we've been preaching is that the intelligent information network as the platform is more than just products and equipment. It's a combination of our products, our software, and our services combined into solutions.
 
 
CM: How has Cisco's overall approach to services grown over the past five years? Moore: Well, I have been here about five years. The actual team that I have today is only about 400 people bigger than it was when I joined, and we don't break out my organization revenue or staffing separately. But services, in general, at Cisco has been a very key part. And it started back in the early days with customers calling in to the Technical Assistance Center for support. We would take that feedback and pass it back into engineering to make our products better, etc. That still goes on today, and that's still a big part of our services business. My organization was what used to be called Professional Services and Advanced Engineering Services. When I was asked to join Cisco, it was to bring those two organizations together and to really focus on the advanced technologies. Five years ago, services was a deployment arm, and it was doing a lot of deployment work that competed with partners. Today, we don't compete with the partners. And I think you could talk to almost any of them and get the feeling that from time to time we're trying to do the same thing with a customer in these large accounts, but for the most part what we're doing is working with advanced technologies and key customers, and we're codifying the methodology and what services are required to make it successful. Then we turn right around and teach that to our partners and make that intellectual property available to them. And that's the key difference between five years ago and today. We started that in all earnestness about three years ago. We declared to our partners that this was our intent. And I think if you go talk to them, we've lived up to that over the last three years.

CM: Where did you find the people who fill the ranks of your advisory unit? Moore: They are, for the most part, people who came out of industry, came out of our own IT department — people who understand business and applications and technology. CM: We know that so many of the large firms are broken into industry practice areas. Are you structured that way or? And where did you find the talent to take this approach? Moore: Our Advisory Services team is structured that way. The vice president who runs that group is Sheila Talton. Sheila ran her own company for about 15 years. She also ran the critical practice at Ernst & Young. And the last two years of her career, before coming here, she worked at EDS in the solutions team. So, that kind of background.
CM: And Cisco's advisory business is then focused along lines of industry? Moore: Yes. Sheila has organized with a manufacturing vertical, a financial services vertical, and a healthcare vertical. Now, we spill into areas like consumer goods and retail, but for the most part those are the key verticals. And we've done projects where we've helped a company identify to build a smart campus in Asia Pacific, where they wanted to have 7,000 engineers. It's actually a story that I think there was a press announcement on, so I can mention it. It's a company called Quanta. It's run by a man named Barry Lam. Barry wanted to build this thing and needed someone that he could rely on. And he physically came here with the team from Asia and met with John and I, and basically looked us in the eye and said, "Can you guys do this?" And, of course, we said, "Yes, we can do this. And here's what we need to be able to do it in terms of control." And we put an Advisory Services team in place. We supplemented that with other people from our engineering team, from our Advanced Services, other areas of Cisco. And we also supplemented them with partners. But they pulled together to do a complete end-to-end design around the network that included IP telephony, wireless security, both networking monitoring and management that hold support systems. And they got this project done under budget and within the specified period of time.
CM: In what other industries are the different ranks of Cisco services professionals being deployed? Moore: In the financial services area, we have customers that are trying to move what they're doing from an availability point of view and with the integration of technology. They're trying to implement something over a three- to five-year plan. We've demonstrated where we can take a five-year project and not only get it done in three years, but accelerate and ensure the success and really overachieve the metrics that they lay out. So, you can understand and appreciate the kinds of people with the 15, 20 years of experience doing this from the companies that I mentioned. They don't grow on trees, but they're infrastructure architects, they're data center architects, and they're application architects. And bringing all that together is really something that allows us to enable what we call our services-oriented network architecture, which we haven't talked about and probably won't on this call. But that's an architecture that we bring to life in this Network as a Platform for enterprise customers. And it takes that kind of expertise to bring those projects to conclusion successfully.
CM: What percentage of Cisco's revenues are services driven today? Moore: It's, I believe, about 17 percent. It fluctuates quarter to quarter, but it's about 17 percent of Cisco's total revenue. If we would start to get close to 20 percent, I think that would be too high.
CM: So revenue is not the measure of choice for Cisco's services business? Moore: Customer satisfaction and loyalty is a key measurement for us. And I would tell you that we do this survey using an outside firm that surveys all of our customers and our services. Our customer loyalty, which we measure, is about 41 percent higher than the industry average when they have a Cisco services contract.