David Holland, senior vice president of Cisco Sports & Entertainment Practice, says, “The goal is to create a constant recurring experience anywhere, any time and any way you want it, and have it enabled through the network.”

Part of that goal is to bring the experience into the home. To meet that plan, Cisco bought Scientific Atlanta Inc. in 2006 for $6.9 billion. The company was a leading maker of set-top boxes and will help integrate Telepresence into the home environment.

Swimming With a Shark

Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, an analyst who covers technology companies, says Cisco has a certain advantage over companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. because Cisco’s technology goes directly to the cloud. He describes Chambers as a “shark.”

“Chambers continues to run on a very aggressive pace,” Enderle says. “This has been a tough market for them because there was so much overpurchase from the dotcom era. Yet they weathered that storm reasonably well and have come out more powerful than they were during the dotcom years.”

Chambers cites six market downturns since joining the company—1993, 1997, 2001, 2003, and 2008-09—and says each time Cisco gained market share, moved into new markets and came out stronger than its peers.

Chambers says two years ago Cisco saw troubling signs in the economy.

“In 2007 we outlined that something was wrong with the finance industry and everyone says that’s unique to Cisco,” he says. “In 2008 we said the downturn was going to be bigger and longer than people think. Others said, ‘We don’t think so.’”

But in the most recent quarter, which ended in October, Cisco’s numbers point to an economic turnaround.

“Our numbers in the U.S. went from negative 20 percent in large enterprise two quarters ago to up 10 percent last quarter. Those are trends that are undeniable,” Chambers says. “That doesn’t mean we couldn’t level out, and it doesn’t mean we couldn’t have a jobless recovery and go back down. Those are very much a possibility.”

But he says companies need to have the “courage” to add head count and grow when the market starts to improve.

The right positioning enabled Cisco to move through the current economic crisis. Chambers says the company was able to commit the necessary resources and reduce its expenses by 10 percent. Employee salaries were not cut, and through a restructuring employee layoffs were held to 2 percent to 3 percent, or between 1,500 and 2,000, of its work force. A significant amount of resources went toward new market “adjacencies,” Cisco’s lingo for new areas of growth. Cisco is working on 30 market adjacencies simultaneously, including the areas of entertainment, health care and energy.

“We are the most aggressive we have been in our history, in the middle of what everyone thought was the height of the downturn,” Chambers says.

In a recent interview Chambers said the company plans to hire a significant number of employees in 2010.