Just a year ago, Cisco's stock was taking a beating after the sales failed to meet Wall Street expectations.The company wasn't exactly reeling, but CEO John Chambers knew something had to be done to right the ship.  

CEO John Chambers received compensation valued at $12.9 million in Cisco's 2011 fiscal year, a period when the company restructured operations, shuttered its Flip video cam business and eliminated more than 12,000 jobs. His total pay package is down 32% compared to 2010, when Chambers received $18.9 million, according to documents filed this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In this installment of IDG Enterprise's "CEO Interview Series," Cisco CEO John Chambers talks with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Scot Finnie and InfoWorld.com Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr about Cisco's changing relationship with IBM, HP and others as it forges ahead into new enterprise IT markets.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform.

Cisco Systems' whirlwind of activity over the past few months wouldn't have been possible without the company's spread-out management structure, in which about 650 people are involved in cross-functional 'councils' and 'boards' that search out potentially profitable new markets, Chairman and CEO John Chambers told a financial analyst conference on Tuesday.

By almost any measure, Cisco Systems, Inc. is the biggest fish in the networking pond. Thanks to more than 130 acquisitions, a brisk pace of internal development and a much-discussed new organizational structure that the company is using to attack a slew of new markets, Cisco's reach extends from the consumer to the enterprise and deep into service provider networks. The company offers everything from personal video cameras to high-end telepresence systems, set-top video boxes to, lately, servers for the data center, in addition to more traditional network gear like routers and switches.