CISCO Systems, which declared a fiscal second-quarter profit rise of 30 per cent this week, bestrides its own sector nearly as confidently as Microsoft and Intel do theirs.
While Microsoft supplies the operating systems that control more than 90 per cent of personal computers, and Intel is the dominant manufacturer of the computer chips at their heart, Cisco makes most of the junction boxes of computer networks.
Cisco controls 85 per cent of the market for routers the devices which control traffic on corporate networks and the Internet. At $64 billion (£46 billion), its market capitalisation is three times that of its four closest competitors combined.
"Cisco just gets stronger and stronger," says Mr Paul Johnson of BancAmerica Robertson Stephens, the US investment bank. "This is a market with great economies of scale."
It is heady stuff for a firm founded in 1984 by a husband and wife at Stanford University to send e-mail to each other across networks which spoke different languages. "Initially we were involved in plumbing and that wasn't very exciting," says Mr John Chambers, the former IBM and Wang executive who has been Cisco's chief executive since 1995. "Our success was based on our ability to sell to two to three technical people deep within the bowels of companies, and so there was no need to be visible."
Now Cisco is number one or two in all but three of the 15 types of networking equipment it produces. An investment in the company when it went public in 1990 has increased 70-fold, and sales reached $6.4billion in 1996-97.
Mr Chambers is not yet a computer industry icon as starry as Bill Gates or Andy Grove, the Intel chief. But his remorseless niceness, which colleagues insist is genuine, has given Cisco a culture of its own: focused on customers in a way that goes beyond the usual corporate rhetoric, and egalitarian to the point that executives share hotel rooms.
But there is one factor in Cisco's success common to Microsoft and Intel: the ability to offer compatibility. Its inter-networking operating system has become the lingua franca of networks.
Two years ago, Mr Chambers remembers, he would have been happy if 10 per cent of customers opted for end-to-end Cisco products. Now as many as 70 per cent of companies do so.
But so far Cisco has not attracted the attention of the regulators, as have Microsoft and Intel. One reason for the lack of regulatory involvement is that Cisco has fewer corporate enemies than Microsoft. Second, it has more competition than might be apparent. Finally, Cisco can thank its low profile. Two years ago, the company was so little known that it received complaints intended for Sysco, the food distributor whose trucks sometimes disturb residential neighbourhoods.
The company must hope regulators' attacks on monopolies in the computer industry also remain directed elsewhere.
