Something tells me this board is mostly filled with people from the competition. The same way the rest of the internet is filled with Russian and Chinese bots and 50 cent army types.
18 replies (most recent on top)
Biri was all academic buzzwords. Not really a vision for actual products in the near term.
What's the story of Biri? I know he was hired as CTO for 6 months and then kicked out.
EN is shrinking too as offices do.
Cisco doesn't even use UCS or their own Data Centers for most products now (Teams, Intersight, Viptela, or Cisco IT). It is all in AWS. Even when UCS servers are free, it doesn't make sense. AWS is more agile and able to scale up or down fast. Cisco's future is going to focus on campus networking and wireless - not so much on DC. Within 5 years DC product sales will shrink by 50%+
Yes, it would have been a good business for Cisco to get into. Hardware sales are a dying business, as customers move to AWS/Azure/GCP/etc there is less and less need for Cisco big iron. Those cloud providers are NOT buying Cisco equipment, they are building it themselves.
Either you move into that business, or you get whats happening now.. Cisco becoming largely irrelevant.
Cloud. Good idea. Why don’t we hire a guy called Biri to build it for us?
You honestly think IaaS would have been a good business for Cisco to get into?!
"What would you have done differently for cloud networking? There’s not much need for networking other than those from Amazon and Microsoft. Everyone says Cisco missed cloud but it’s more that cloud made networking far less relevant."
How about get into it? It was obvious long before Azure and GCP had grown to anything that cloud hosting for DC's would be big. Cisco had the money, revenue, and technology to grow out something like AWS and Azure, but decided not to.
Having heard all about Interweb and what a cluster it turned out be, we just gave up.
Quick search of Interweb and Cisco pops up a twitter post from 2010 when we still had the chance. This was all about giving the channel partners a way to compete with the upcoming cloud providers that are ubiquitous today. Great idea, poor execution and even less investment.
There is a lot of innovation going on here, it just seems that we are chasing the next shiny object instead of investing to build the next great thing.
Big innovation is risky and dead.
What would you have done differently for cloud networking? There’s not much need for networking other than those from Amazon and Microsoft. Everyone says Cisco missed cloud but it’s more that cloud made networking far less relevant.
Yep, Microsoft did.. It's rare, but it can happen. Cisco doesnt look to have anything like that going on though. They totally missed the biggest market transition ever in networking (cloud).
Yet Microsoft overcame the innovators dilemma
I work for the competition, havent posted here before tho.. I worked at Cisco for 12 years, loved it up till Chuck became CEO and the culture changed.
At the end of the day companies go through life cycles in the tech world.. Startup -> Hyper Growth - > Leveling off -> Decline
It's not unique to Cisco. While I think Cisco has done a LOT of things to put themselves in this situation, I also think it was inevitable to a certain degree. Piss poor management starting around 2012 or so essentially ensured that the company was going to go down the tubes..
Says the Cisco HR person
The most visits here come from the negative nancies while the majority of people are doing their job kicking butt.
I think they’re mostly Cisco people and have a glimmer of truth to their comments but they are drama queens that blow it out of proportion.
No, this board is populated by current and former Cisco employees, with occasional appearances by Cisco HR, as evidenced by this topic.
Agreed. While the general themes are correct most things are overblown on here versus reality.