If someone were wondering what Cisco wants the world to think of them, they’d only need to look at how they’re cultivating their identity with advertisements. “Switching, Routing, and Network Security,” reads the fader as it spells out everyone’s favorite mega-networking company’s corporate identity. They’ve been part of supplying routing for everything from the deepest recesses of the Internet to providing the last-mile for in home networking.

Although, a lot of this may be changing now as Cisco’s shareholder climate cools due to the rough road they’ve traveled over the past few months.

Bloomberg is reporting right now that the networking giant may be changing gears, according to CEO John Chambers,

Chambers wrote in an April 4 memo to staff that he will make several “targeted moves” in the coming weeks to restore lost credibility and sharpen the company’s focus. Its shares have declined 11.5 percent so far this year, compared with a 5.3 percent gain in Juniper Networks Inc.

“You’re talking about a business with $40 billion of cash on hand and high single-A ratings where the stock has been a huge laggard,” said Joel Levington, managing director of Brookfield Investment Management Inc. in New York. “Certainly a set of shareholders are not happy and are starting to get more vocal about it. You don’t see that in IBM. You don’t see that in Oracle.”

Amid these “targeted moves” it’s been rumored that they might be withdrawing from the end-user consumer market—such as the home, where they’ve made a lot of strong inroads recently—and PC Magazine has picked up this angle. When the first Cisco products started appearing in home-networking devices, it certainly surprised me. They already hold a huge mindshare of the networking market due to their presence in the Internet backbone; but through acquiring Linksys in 2003 they inserted themselves deeply into the home networking vertical.

Now that they’re seeing some strong opposition in the corporate networking and routing markets—such as from Juniper Networks, and especially competition for cloud supremacy. Chamber’s memo could be seen like a general telling his troops that they’re spending too much time on too many fronts. Traditionally, the response to this is to withdraw from losing fronts and consolidate them into strong fronts and the PC Magazine article argues that Cisco in the home happens to be the weak front, whereas corporate and cloud-networking is the strong front.

Immense moves are already being made into cloud-storage by companies like EMC, but the cloud storage infrastructure doesn’t operate without mobility and that agility is supplied through bandwidth. The cloud networks being leveraged by Amazon and Google, the 12 Petabytes of Storage held by Isilon Systems for iTunes, all of these will need bandwidth and if Cisco puts themselves ahead of their competitors in their capability of providing them they’ll have a lock-in for this sort of data movement.

In fact, we see Cisco mobilizing for a huge amount of cloud-based offerings: Cisco for datacenters, entering into deeper cloud-management software and hardware, and even looking to acquire more cloud-service orientation with newScale.

As a networking-power, Cisco may be moving away from end-user consumer products, which means that they may simply diminish or sideline their progress there, and it looks like they’re going to focus heavily on providing meaningful bandwidth solutions to take advantage of all the storage distributing across the globe. With more people going mobile than ever, companies like Amazon and Google looking to connect not just people but enable them to virtualize themselves onto the Internet, the cloud will need bridge builders who can provide the mobility necessary to move data between storage and service customers.

Cisco is ably positioned to provide exactly this type of portability.