Inside the secret world at Cisco headquarters - filled with heroes, 'mythical' nap pods, and goats
Cisco employs over 71,000 employees, with 15,500 full time employees in the Bay Area. It has some outpost offices in San Francisco (like Meraki and OpenDNS, companies it acquired). But most of those people work at its San Jose headquarters.
Here's a shot of Cisco's new CEO Chuck Robbins hanging out in the crowd while one of his executives gave a presentation to a room of a journalists. His goal for the company is to move "faster, faster, faster" he says.
Cisco's San Jose campus is so enormous it actually spans three cities: San Jose, Milpitas, and Mountain View.
Here's another view of the campus area from Google Maps satellite view.
To tour the campus, we had to drive from spot to spot. Our tour guide is Nigel Glennie, on the PR and communications team. Glennie is responsible for communicating with employees whenever some kind of incident or disaster involving Cisco occurs. (Stay tuned for more on that.)
The main visitor building is Building 9, the "Cisco Customer Experience Center."
Cisco offers people live demos of its products here. Cisco used to have an Executive Briefing Center where execs would do huge PowerPoint presentations. It was an inside joke to "correlate intellectual capacity with the complexity of your PowerPoint presentations. No more," Robbins said.
In this room of the new "Customer Experience Center," Cisco is showing off new technology for the manufacturing industry.
For instance, this woman is demonstrating a robotic arm on a Cisco network. See that small box with the yellow cord on the bottom?
That's the Cisco product. It's a new switch that can help predict when a robot will break down before it actually breaks.
Cisco also demonstrates technology for other industries, like transportation, retail, and sports.
Cisco's big push is "collaboration" tech for online meetings, phone calls, videoconferencing, instant messaging and the like. It has apps available for the Apple Watch ...
... for its new DX80 touchscreen PC monitor/videoconferencing unit that can also be used like a big Android tablet ...
And Cisco still sells its classic huge videoconferencing rooms. This one has two cameras that will hunt down the person who is talking.
Obviously, all this stuff works on iPads and Macs. Cisco just announced a new agreement with Apple to build special iOS-friendly networks, too.
Cisco execs still love their PowePoints, though. Only today they do them on the enormous wall-sized touchscreens that the company sells.
Cisco eats its own dog food. All of this tech is being used by its own employees everyday. For instance, it doesn't hire receptionists for all of its many buildings ...
Instead it uses one receptionist and beams him around to about 10 other lobbies via videoconferencing. (We thought this man was just a video until he talked to us ...)
Here's one of the kitchen areas where all the reporters on campus ate lunch.
In the corner of the kitchen area was everyone's favorite thing: One reporter called it the "stalking machine." It lets you see where everyone on campus is. We found chairman John Chambers, who's "retired" from the CEO position but still at the heart of the company. When he's not flying his private jet to meet with world leaders, his laughter (and his entourage) fill the halls of Cisco's headquarters.
It even showed us the walking path Chambers took when he moved from office to office. It's like a real life Harry Potter "Maurader's Map."
A five-minute drive away from Building 9 is where you'll find the company's pride and joy, the Network Emergency Response Vehicle (NERV) trucks. These bring internet and phone service to places struck by disaster. That's the team's leader Rakesh Bharania (right) and a new employee, network engineer Jason Hoac (left).
The trucks live in this parking lot. This team is called Tactical Operations (TACOPs) and travels all over the US and the world to disasters like hurricanes, bombings, floods, what-have-you — and they never charge for their services. Cisco covers all equipment and expenses, and employees act as volunteers.
Here's a look inside the NERV truck. It's is a telephone company on wheels.
There's also a small emergency telecom/network box that the team can take on a plane as carry-on.
This team, which includes 350 Cisco employee volunteers, has saved lives. For instance, in 2013 while working at a domestic event, they saw a person have a heart attack. They were dispatched paramedics and the person made a full recovery. (That's Business Insider's Julie Bort in the NERVE truck with Hoac wearing the team's safety vest.)
Sometimes the team goes into dangerous areas at great personal risk. This team is beloved at Cisco. They are the world's network/communication super heroes.
This is Jared Govorko, another of Cisco's secret heroes. He's a leader in the Safety, Security and Business Resiliency group. His team is like the quiet guardian angels at Cisco, watching over all employees worldwide to protect them from medical emergencies, natural disasters, and criminal acts.
Here's the room where the team watches the campus. When an employee dials 911 or pulls an AED from the wall, the calls come here. The team sends a Cisco EMT (or security guard) and coordinates with city emergency people. The team handled 229 medical emergencies on campus last year. Because they get there in about 3 minutes, they have directly saved three lives in the last five years, Govorko says.
Govorko also took us into a secret room where we weren't allowed to take pictures. It's where Cisco tests new security products by trying them out on its own campus. It looked like a bunch of PCs, screens, and blinky-light boxes. Here's a picture of the sign on the door.
One of the best perks at Cisco is not a secret. It's a massive 44,000 square foot fitness center called Life Connections.
In its reception area was this Cisco electric sign showing off stuff going on with the company, like Cisco's products in the film The Martian.
Here's the lobby of the fitness center.
Here's a peek at the main floor.
and another workout area.
This is Rob Kelly, who is more than just the facility manager at the club, he's an ex-military network guy, a member of the TACOPs team. Because this is Cisco, this fitness center is one of the biggest users of internet TV tech in the world.
Every treadmill, stair climber, rower, and so on has a screen with full TV and internet access.
And because this is a company that worships connectivity, you can even Skype into a meeting while running on the treadmill.
If you don't want to take your meeting on the treadmill, the fitness center has phone booth rooms where employees can do meetings in the middle of their workouts.
Upstairs the club has indoor courts ...
a yoga studio,
Pilates studio,
spinning studio,
and several massage rooms.
Massages are not free, but employees do sometimes get them as gifts. After Cisco announced its new CEO and the PR team worked non-stop for weeks, they were all treated to a massage.
Another HUGE perk for Cisco employees is a new, full medical facility in partnership with Stanford. This will use all the coolest medical digital tech from Cisco. It was being installed when we visited.
Employees have access to physical therapy, sports medicine, chiropractors ...
and even dentists, right on campus.
Upstairs, there's even a pharmacy.
Downstairs, there's a juice and salad place, for healthy food after a workout.
Cisco also has a huge cafeteria elsewhere on campus. The food isn't free but it is reasonably priced and quite tasty.
And there are plenty of little kitchens and snack machines in all the buildings.
But the best perk of all is something so secret, almost no one on campus knows about it. We heard a myth about nap pods somewhere in Building I.
It took a bit of effort to find an employee in Building I that knew something about this "myth." She took us to this room.
But they weren't nap pods. There were three rooms that contained very expensive massage chairs complete with TV screens. (At Cisco, you can do a videoconference even while chilling in a massage chair.)
That's Business Insider's Bort getting her massage.
Nigel Glennie was really happy that he discovered these chairs. None of the other Cisco employees we talked to knew they were there.
After our massages, we headed to the executive tower, the only three-story building on campus. Here's the view out the window.
Cisco is in the middle of renovating its headquarters campus, but the executive tower, where you'll find offices for John Chambers and Chuck Robbins, is mostly finished.
The remodeled offices have a modern feel ...
with big murals.
Cisco ripped out the old cubby kingdom and now uses more open seating.
Here's Cisco's board room, loaded with Cisco's technology.
And there are plenty of phone booth video conference rooms like this one, too.
But the weirdest thing on campus is the view out this window of the executive tower, where the PR team works.
Look across the street at the neighbor's property and you see goats.
Lots of goats. The neighbor has been using them as an eco-friendly way to rid the property of weeds.
Overall the feel of the campus can be described as huge, cheerful and connected, exactly what you'd expect from the world's biggest network equipment maker.
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