Marketing Analysis of Cisco Product - Assignment Example

Marketing Analysis of Cisco Product Number: Lecturer: Marketing Analysis of Cisco Product Cisco is a multinational company in the United States of America with its headquarters in San Jose, San Francisco, California. It designs and manufactures networking equipment for small businesses to big corporate in internet connectivity, hosting, data backups and internet service providers. It has become a strong brand in its industry and boasts of the world’s biggest market share for its products. The assets base currently stands at about $92 billion with last financial year revenue in excess of $46 billion and net income of $8 billion.

Positioning statement Cisco is an internet solutions equipments manufacturer that makes powerful connectivity possible and providing easy access to information anytime. This is made possible by its product range in hardware, software and service offerings to provide an integrated business solution to its customers. It is the market leader in innovation and diversity able to provide reliable products supported by a wide geographical market coverage hence offering at competitive prices. Forward-looking focus is what drives the company in the innovation keen to incorporate the dynamic consumer needs (Cisco Systems Inc.) Competition Cisco has a wide range of competitors in the industry owing to its product portfolio, from hardware to software, being the top in some and playing second fiddle in other products.

They include Hewlett-Packard (HP), International Business Machines (IBM) and Dell in the computer hardware category. All of these companies rank above of Cisco in the United States of America in sales. In other products, Cisco is competing with HP in the provision of Ethernet switching, but Cisco has more that 65% of the market share. Has about 58% of the market share in $1.6billion market wireless local area networks (LANs), followed by Aruba with about 9% only in 2009. In core routing the only company it is competing with in Juniper with Cisco controlling two thirds of the market.

Juniper is a competitor in an over $7 billion security market it competes in the manufacture of VPN hardware and software firewalls. Another major competitor is Alcatel-Lucent in carrier edge routing in Ethernet service delivery. The products here include the 7k and 9k ASR series devices are the dominating with about 43% of the $1.34 billion market. It is providing in another product segment in switching and routing in global consumer traffic transmission on video content like teleconferencing by rolling out TelePresence virtual conferencing.

It is targeting, by its own internal research, a market share of 91% by 2014. Its main challenger in this product segment is Polycom. Enterprise telephony is another $ 12 market in 2009 with its market share then at about 17% with its competitor, Avaya controlling 14.6% in the manufacture of handsets and IP PBXs. In networking alone, Cisco currently controls over 80% of the industry (Duffy). Cisco has managed to take on competition by using various strategies to counter the highly competitive market in its product range.

Diversification is the major competitive tool that the company used in its product range with a huge portfolio of products which can serve every need of even one company from data hosting, internet and Ethernet, LANs, hardware (computers, routers, phones and servers) and software tailored specifically for the companies. The other strategy is the acquisition of smaller but possible competitors and new product lines and talents like Stratacom, Cerent Corporation and Scientific Atlanta. The latest acquisition is NDS Group.

The other major competitive tool the company employed is competitive prices it offers from the advantage of huge sales and product portfolio. The company’s products and services are cost effective but are of high quality. The last but not least is the geographical presence around the world covering all continents except Antarctica with a network of supply chain and using other channels like online sales and deliver to customer premises (Mourdoukoutas). The 4 P’s (product, promotion, price and place) The company’s products are high quality, reliable very secure and very flexible when changes are needed to any size and improvements.

The company is very innovative in its product range offering and researching and developing new products for the changing customer needs, being a strong leader in the industry. The latest product ASR 10k series offers customers with high-speed transformative equipment with huge capacity. In its promotion, the company is using many channels and forums to take the message out there. It hosts Summit, a social media platform to engage all members of the society. It comprises of press releases for new products, sessions with router developers, surveys and feedback channels and public forums in the headquarters.

Other modes of advertisements in mainstream media (magazines, newspapers, radio and television), use of blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. It uses its web to reach the online information and market besides emailing current clients about new products and hosting business and technology conferences when it releases new products (Chang). The company’s pricing strategy is offering competitive prices, slightly lower than the competition in order to drive sales and still make profits out of high turnover.

It offers new models at relatively lower prices still internally to reach current and new customers. The place that the company is using strategically is more engaging and interactive platforms like www.cisco.com. The products with full descriptions are viewed and bought online for delivery from the website. The medium allows a more interactive engagement with the developers where queries raised are answered, and customer feedback is channeled through for improvement. Cisco product’s benefits and value to the customer are immense when considered at how effective they are in managing effectively networking, internet service provision, data hosting and high-speed information processing and routing.

All these combined can provide leverage for big corporate and small businesses to improve operational efficiency, turnaround time, minimize office space through cloud data hosting, resulting in huge cost savings. A company, in cloud computing, does not need to have huge capital outlay to acquire hardware backup machines which can be done at slightly lower costs. Company executives and staff mobility can be greatly reduced through teleconferencing to maximize productivity alongside saving costs.

The company operates and strives to promote and conduct ethical business guided by Code of Business Conduct, corporate governance and ethics program established under the law and the industry regulatory framework. The company has over 72 thousand employees around the world drawn from the immediate community; skilled and non-skilled. It engages in CSR activities around the world to empower communities by financing education, healthcare, famine and disasters through various initiatives. Moreover, as a generator of e-waste the company is the industry forefront in helping disposing obsolete hardware by collecting from the customer and recycling.

It does all these by employing high integrity, respect, open communication, accountability and proper corporate governance. The company is a service provider in the most critical industry; security. The company manufactures security equipment for governments and security agencies besides hosting client information around the world. The company has to secure the information not to fall in wrong hands. In other circumstances, it has to be the source of information in such public interest areas like human rights violations and freedoms of access to information.

Like any other business entity, Cisco has both opportunities and threat that it has to use to leverage in securing more markets and remaining in business in the face of competition. The world at the moment is growing very fast in internet use, owing to the multiplicity in devices that can access internet including handset phones. Internet is a source of information, and every human being is striving to access the data for the own use and application. Mobile telephony and internet service providers are demanding more traffic and capacity to handle the ever growing client base that threatens to outstrip the current capacity.

Global IP devices are expected to reach about 15 billion by 2015. Studies indicate that the internet content in the world wide web today created in the last three years alone is 90% due to entry of Youtube, facebook, twitter and Linkedin alongside other social networking platforms. Therefore, Cisco has a huge market potential, and it has to seize every other opportunity to do business. The main threat that the company facing, is the presence and proliferation of competitors in the industry; some have been mentioned above in competition.

The companies sell similar products to Cisco. Recently, the company parted ways with Linksys and from the separation it is a potential area of patent rights infringement threat. Some other forms of threat that the company must deal with is the competitors poaching Cisco’s highly trained and skilled staff who apart from taking away the talent, they go with product knowledge and crucial company information (Cisco Systems Inc.). Works Cited Chang, Angie. (2012 November 16). Cisco founder Sandy Lerner talks competitive advantage and venture capital for women.

Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/women2/2012/11/16/cisco-founder-sandy-lerner-talks-competitive-advantage-and-vc-for-women-entrepreneurs/ Cisco Systems Inc. Governance & Ethics. Retrieved on 11 April 2013 from http://csr.cisco.com/pages/governance-and-ethics Cisco Systems Inc. Products &Services. Retrieved April 2013 from http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/index.html Duffy, Jim. (2010 October 13). Cisco’s top ten rivals. Network World. Retrieved from http://www.networkworld.

com/news/2010/101310-cisco-rivals.html Mourdoukoutas, Panos. (2012 March 16). Cisco is getting bigger, but is it getting better? Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2012/03/16/cisco-is-getting-bigger-but-is-it-getting-better/