"You Are Going To See A Brutal, Brutal Consolidation Of The IT Industry"

John Chambers, Cisco CEO believes there will be a rapid shakeup in the tech industry affecting the top tech companies and even the world at large. Without pointing fingers, He suggests that some of the top players in the industry which includes his own Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle will fail  along the line using HP and IBM as example when he said "When we talk about the top five IT players, watch how disastrous the last 2.5 years have been where an HP and an IBM haven't had revenue growth for two to three years."

He showed this chart, documenting how many quarters of growth each have had. With Microsoft, not Cisco, doing the best with 14 quarters of 3% or better revenue growth. He noted that most of CIsco's initial competitors gave way over the years and he subtly hinted that nearly all the current ones won't last 2018.According to his chart, these vendors are vanishing between today and 2018: Juniper, CheckPoint, Ruckus, Palo Alto Networks, Avaya, Aruba, F5, ShoreTel, Riverbed, Huawei, Arista, Fortnet, Polycom, and Brocade.

He also warned:

"Every company in this world has to be realistic ... Out of the private sector companies in this room, regardless of where you are in this world, 87% of you will have a major financial shortfall in the next 15 years, and a little over 10% of you will ever come back from it. And of all the enterprise companies in this world, only a 1/3 of us will exist in a meaningful way in 25 years."

The companies that survive will cope with the rapid pace of change better than those that fail, he concluded.