John Chambers steps down as Cisco chairman

John Thomas Chambers (68), is to step down as chairman of Cisco Systems, the networking equipment company.

During his tenure, in the last 15 years, Cisco was described as the world’s most valuable company, and currently going through upheaval caused by cloud computing.

Chambers stepped back as Chief executive two years ago, handing the position to Chuck Robbins, although he stayed as executive chairman.

Mr. Chambers rode the first wave of internet tech boom of the 1990s,  with his unmistakable West Virginia accent and salesman’s charm, constant disruption,  reinvention, and innovation in the breakthrough, he has helped to grow the world’s biggest communications equipment maker.

The routers and IP-based gears dominated most of the voice calls and other traffic that flowed over all the networks, undermining giant telecoms equipment companies.

“ Our competitors form 10 years and before are gone or acquired by bigger companies, and till now nobody has been able to get us,” Mr. Chambers said obviously referring to successful start-ups which would turn into a “ Cisco killer”.

When Mr. Chambers joined Cisco, it was small IP networking company in the mid-1990s, emerging from $1.2bn to a $48bn  revenue last year. “ We got the market transitions right. We innovated at a pace other companies couldn’t.”

During the boom, Cisco even overtook Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company and its stock market value topped $600bn and make it the third most valuable today after Alphabet and Apple.