Cisco's strategy for the last 20 years appears to be: Sell the same old routers and switches, buy companies, burn case reserves on stock buy backs, pay dividends. Obviously, this strategy is intended to lift the short term share price and personally enrich executives and board members. My question is, how long can this possibly continue, white box networking and the cloud is the future. Will the board ever wake up and bring in some executives with actual vision and a plan for the future?
11 replies (most recent on top)
lol. Remember this from 2015?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ciscos-john-chambers-has-some-dire-predictions/
Or as RT adds: "blockbusted"?
lol. That's Cisco today-- getting blockbusted.
"The Future argument"
Saying something is the "future" without stating any reason just makes your argumentation pointless
" Real tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google".
You have just proven that you have no knowledge whatsoever. None of those companies are Real tech companies, they are advertisement shops that just happen to develop tech to increase their add revenew, not to mention to sell your personal data.
"Real tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google know much more about networking"
Social networking mabie, Lets take Open/R from Facebook that states "take advantage of new changes in protocols and resources”, it usually signals to me that some grad student decided to rewrite the whole thing in Java because they didn’t understand.
" Google know much more about networking than Cisco"
Again pointless statement without any argument backing it up
CISCO is heading in the same direction as GE or IBM. If you have a subscription or free views left read this FT article on GE and think about the future at Cisco.
https://www.ft.com/content/b0060c92-c64a-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9
General Electric has an overactive imagination
The conglomerate became better at marketing itself than at managing its business
@VpHA3VX-8ftx The point is that any proprietary networking and server hardware will become irrelevant in the future. Business will use cloud providers for all of their workloads, employees just need internet access. Real tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google know much more about networking than Cisco and they just roll their own gear because it's vastly superior. Also, Cisco collab software is irrelevant,Cisco Spark has no paying customers and had a 4 day outage
@VpHA3VX-8ftx sounds like my manager at Cisco.
Mo, is that you?
Sell the SAME OLD routers? Obviously, you're not a networking guy. Not to mention, cisco is the market share leader in wireless lan; market share leader in optical networking; #1 market share in network security; #2 marketshare in server HW; #2 marketshare in collaboration; #2 marketshare in SD-WAN. Not too shabby.
Honestly speaking, Cisco is not easy to be in the history book like Nortel, Lucent and Motorola. The current financial strength is 46 Billion of cash or equivalent, positive cash flow of 13 Billion per year, buyback 17 Billion per year. It is not so easy to be eliminated by others unless the management made some serious mistakes in the M&A.
Several Large SP organisations have worked on whitebox projects with limited success in adoption by customers due to the complexity of 'who supports what'. What the OP really means is software and virualsiation fo functions is the way.... But Clearly Op hasn't been looking at Cisco strategy to evolve to software led selling.... and whats being DELIVERED in Enterprise Networking pisses all over what any othe vendor can deliver.
Our head of security clearly did not like what he saw.
The executives are passing their time off to cross the retirement age. CR is one among them. Cisco is dragging like this, just keeping the last flame of the great American telecommunication revolution blip-ping but will be soon a history like Nortel, Lucent, Motorola, etc.
Cisco will lobby governments to outlaw white box equipment within specific sectors.