As outgoing CEO John Chambers hosted his last Cisco Live annual conference, it was fitting that the centrepiece of the event was virtualization. The somewhat abrupt timing of Chambers’ retirement indicated that he felt the giant IP company was at an important turning point, which made it the right time for a change of leadership. The move, by carriers and enterprises, from physical to virtual networks and towards software-defined networking (SDN) will define the next few years in Cisco’s core business and decide whether it remains in the dominant position which Chambers, despite recent turmoils, carved out for it. The risks are huge, but Cisco is rising to the challenge robustly, putting together an SDN platform which will increasingly be…