Cisco's Chambers: Video Will Be 90% of Network Traffic

Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers, on the company’s fiscal Q3 2009 earnings call yesterday, emphasized the growth of video in general as driving its business in the years ahead.

“We believe that video will account for 90% of the load on networks in the future,” he said. “Intelligence in the network is required to get the right device to the right screen with the right capability to search video content in a secure way across any combination of networks while at the same time having an ability to push the content to common, communities of interest. Stay tuned because you will be hearing a lot more about video from us over the next several years.”

Unfortunately, Cisco doesn’t break out numbers for Scientific Atlanta (now known as the Service Provider Video Technology Group).

Chambers did disclose that video systems sales were down 5% year-over-year. In addition, Cisco’s total service provider orders for the quarter were down 33% globally, and down approximately 30% in the U.S.

Overall, for the quarter ended April 25, Cisco reported net sales of $8.2 billion, down 16.6% from the same period last year, and net income of $1.3 billion, down 24% year-over-year.

At the same time, Chambers sounded a hopeful note, reporting that for the first time “in many quarters” customers are “seeing some stabilization, a leveling out, or in other words they are finally beginning to have something reasonably solid underneath their feet… as opposed to what has been over the last several quarters a continued deceleration in their business.”