Why Cisco is My Hero
by Miki Saxon
CEO John Chambers has been successfully reinventing Cisco Systems for 19 years, but his best innovation has a very low profile. In fact, this is the first time I’ve heard/read about it in the nine years it’s been around.
The unsung innovation is called TacOps and it’s actually a team of heroes.
TacOps is a combination of people and equipment that bring emergency communications to areas devastated by both natural and manmade disasters.
Cisco has a special team called Tactical Operations that swoops in after natural disasters to get Internet and telephone service back up, so that rescue workers can do their jobs.
TacOps first response was in 2005 for Hurricane Katrina and its most recent to Typhoon Haiyan.
The cost of both equipment and manpower is totally funded by Cisco.
Nor does the team wait until things settle down; rather they are there with the first responders in a crisis when working communications are so critical to saving lives.
And while these deployments may showcase its equipment in a positive way you can be sure that’s not the driving factor.
If it was, we all would have heard a lot more about it over the last nine years.
So hats off to Cisco; it sure would be nice if more companies emulated its efforts in their own way.
Image credit: Cisco TacOps
August 29th, 2014 at 1:17 am
[…] It’s not his 19 years of reinventing Cisco and keeping it on top, but for other stuff, such as Cisco’s disaster-focused Tactical Operations team. […]