Cisco CEO Chambers plans Aussie visit

The long-time chief executive of global networking giant Cisco Systems, John Chambers, is planning to touch down in Sydney in late April.

Cisco's local arm could not comment on the purpose of Chambers' visit or his agenda, however, one event on the CEO's calendar will be an address to a lunch held by influential business group the Trans-Tasman Business Circle on 27 April. Tickets to the lunch start at AU$150 per head.

The Cisco supremo is also likely to spend time with key customers in the region, as is common practice of visiting heads of large global technology vendors.

In Australia, this would almost certainly entail a visit to the nation's top two telcos Telstra and Optus, both of which have massive networking contracts with Cisco in the order of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Other likely customers would include major financial institutions and other private industry titans and government purchasing groups.

Chambers has helmed Cisco since 1995, growing the company in the process from US$1.2 billion in annual revenues to approximately US$30 billion currently. Cisco's newest drive has seen it pushing hard into the area of video -- for example last week the networking giant said it intended to buy videoconferencing company WebEx for US$3.2 billion.