Prem Jain and the gang?
20 replies (most recent on top)
"""For those complaining about spin-ins, that's the only way cisco could/can innovate. Have seen too many internal projects ki---d due to politics or whatever, and then the same projects gone on to become someone else's innovation."""
The spin ins create a toxic culture. I remember one young guy who admired Prem, or one of the other three. And for some reason, or another, he thought that he would eventually work for M, P, L, or S (or all four of them). Or whatever he was thinking. But he never did pass their interviews. And he just became bitter. Eventually he started arguing with co-workers and manager. He had a chip on his shoulder and eventually got moved from manager to manager. I was glad when they moved him out of my group. I mean he was a smart guy, but he felt like MPLS owed him something, and that management owed him something, and that other people owed him.
Like he was a caste above others type of BS.
MPLS products were never a blessing to Cisco. For example, Cisco could have bought VMware instead of UCS.
UCS and other MPLS projects were a huge waste of money. The APIC/Em 9k also was not well. None of it was really innovation.
Honestly MPLS as a team never made a quality product. They basically were John Chamber's expensive ideas. John Chambers ended up paying three times.
- Fund MPLS companies.
- Buy MPLS companies.
- Clean up after MPLS.
That's why John Chamber's sits on the Board of Directors, at their current company Pensando .com
He probably believes Cisco made a mistake by not getting in the Cloud, and he probably believes he will clean that up.
If history repeats, John Chambers will:
- Fund MPLS Pensando Cloud
- Buy MPLS Pensando Cloud
- Clean up after MPLS again.
Otherwise HP, or some other company will buy Pensando.
Jon Chambers once warned the industry that there will be fewer companies in the near future.
Let's see who that is.
But what company, other than Cisco can afford to pay for Pensando three times over.
This time MPLS / Pensando better be worth more than just an idea factory (with the worst quality - basically cr-p that only an emperor could afford to buy and clean up after (like your mother cleaned up after you).
In short, time will tell, Pensando will either become the Amazon contender that they claim to be. In which case, John Chambers will become the next Bezos.
Or.
They will get bought up by some other company who will need to clean that chit up.
The irony of it is, if MPLS was ever worth a dime, the ONLY way they could prove it is to finally stand on their own. That means no Cisco buyout.
Folks, I give you the next Amazon.
Or, HP buys them, and that's the end of that BS.
For those complaining about spin-ins, that's the only way cisco could/can innovate. Have seen too many internal projects ki---d due to politics or whatever, and then the same projects gone on to become someone else's innovation.
MPLS was most famous for creating the whole "spin in" culture at Cisco......which was horrible. A "spin-in" startup was just a startup company created and staffed by Cisco employees....and after a few key milestones they were showered with money and pulled back into Cisco. It's like creating a startup company with zero risk. The MPLS folks favored only a small set of key Cisco engineers to take with them to these "spin-in" companies, knowing it would make them rich.....which alienated pretty much the rest of Cisco engineers. The whole "spin-in" concept was rigged, and ethically wrong.
MPLS history lesson for those who don't know.
UCSC was not actuallly very successful, for the first few years it actually lost money. Cisco almost ki---d it off several times. It was not until after MPLS left that Cisco started deploying UCS and making money. Honestly they could have saved their money and continued using HP blades. Seriously.
The MPLS team was also NOT responsible for Cat6k. They worked on Cat5k. Cat6k actuallly came later.
MDS meh.
ACI/9000 was a friggin disaster.
John Chamber is on the Board of Directors at Pensango ( or whatever it is called ).
The four members whose initial's start with M & P & L & S ( MPLS ) may be there too. I can't remember.
The question is are these guys any good, and will Cisco buy them ( and get their EX-CEO back ) ?
Time will tell.
the world moves on, the recipe grew stake, and John Chambers isn't there anymore to feed the cycle of innovation that creates divisiveness and resentment. From within Cisco... he still bankrolls it, look up "pensando"...
I agree that Cat6k, MDS and UCS, very successful ... but "and finally brought ACI/N9K" - not immensely successful, more like a bad dream!
The MPLS team never focused on quality. So, in fact they were simply idea machines. Cisco spent multiple billions cleaning up after them. They few things they actually did do, Cisco actuallly have achieved without them, and without the MPLS startup company's bailing out (multiple times) Cisco would have done so at a MUCH lower cost.
The MPLS team promised Cisco a cloud startup, which Cisco bought from the 4 MPLS chumps.
It turned out to be CLOWN technology, instead of CLOUD technology.
MPLS was nothing without Cisco. Not the other way around.
The MPLS gang undeniably made Cisco what it is today. Without the Cat5K which became the Cat6K/Cat6500, Cisco would not have become the de-facto industry benchmark for Ethernet switching. They brought the MDS (Fibre Channel switching) to Cisco, they brought x86 servers (UCS) and finally brought ACI/N9K - all arguably immensely successful products with well over $1B run-rate per quarter. But ... MPLS developed a few bad habits along the way: making unrealistic promises and commitments to customers, releasing too early at the expense of quality, assuming Cisco would print cash like the Treasury department, pillaging other teams for their best talent, etc. Their past successes led to an overinflated ego that took the best of them. Just like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun and burnt their wings. They became too greedy and got kicked out by CR. Without Cisco's piggy bank, Cisco's code base and Cisco's sales folks they are struggling to make a name for themselves. They thought they could sell hundreds of thousands of programmable advanced NICs to MSDCs, but that didn't work due to a poor understanding of MSDC's own engineering capabilities (AWS Nitro), over-estimating their own abilities, under-estimating competition (NVIDIA) and over-pricing their product. Result: nobody is buying their programmable adapters at scale. HPE will probably buy their assets when they've run out of cash. There's nothing uncle John can do either, being the terrible strategist he is. Look at his last years at Cisco, it was painful to see him sitting stuck in a three-wheel horse-drawn caboose while public cloud passed him in a bullet train.
Ah, the ol' gang of four (aka Cisco's infamous MPLS (startup company in a box, team)).
- ) Sold a Cloud company to Cisco.
- ) Trying to sell a Cloud company to HP.
- ) Claiming it will take down Amazon Cloud.
- ) Apparently it also runs on Amazon Cloud.
Fool me once......
Hahahahahaha,
You guys give the MPLS team way too much credit. I think that was a joke right. I mean the MPLS team gets credit for every Cisco product, haha 😂 too funny.
For pets sake, they created Pensando saying it would take on Amazon. Cisco don't have NO Amazon like cloud, or anything remotely close to it.
Crickey, they were ALL about that blowing smoke up your mirror$$.
He used to go around and visit all the business units and all the people would say THE DALY LAMA is coming. Hahahaha what a joke. He came and went like the DALY LAMA and took all their stock options.
I remember all the managers saying pay grades below manager don't get stocks. All those people didn't get anything, but their DALY LAMA heroes, MPLS walked off with billions, for nada and for diddly squat.
Smartest guys in the room, at that time actuallly, I mean, they walked off with the keys to the kingdom, basically.
But in the end, all they did was make up campfire stories about a new idea, and bilk Cisco out of billions, for each consecutive campfire story.
They were good at extortion, but not as technologists. Certainly not a Steve Jobs. I think more like modern day Bonnie & Clyde, but with a startup company to sell (obviously a unique approach to withdrawal of corporate funding, but effective nonetheless).
And sell they did. Fortunately, Chuck had enough of that BS. And I don't think they will ever get another dime.
MPLS is expensive and in cloud days, not a real sought after solution. It was good to replace frame relay and similar hub and spoke designs. Now with cloud over public internet and the emergence of SD-WAN, MPLS will fade away slowly but maybe not completely in the near future
pmg+1b2vqfC1 Catalyst switches, MDS, UCS, Nexus 9K. Basically every Cisco networking product.
Which MPLS products still exist?
Jain spent 23 years as part of a team of engineers who were financed by Cisco Systems to create innovative new start-ups. Known as the “heart, soul and brains” of Cisco, the team were given wide latitude and formed several successful businesses that the company bankrolled and then bought back for significantly more money when they hit financial mileposts. The team and their startups were responsible for every breakout product that Cisco created in the past two decades.
I assumed MPLS was Cisco's dysfunctional version of product management. Most new product features were MPLS spin-ins. While cheap product maintenance occurred within product engineering functions.
MPLS ... omg. I remember working on that back in 2002.
HP don't have money to burn?
Did MPLS ever bring positive cash flow to Cisco?
Or just take money from the koffers ? Stock options too...
CR sidelined their worthless behinds. They went and started a lame cloud networking company that HPE is sort of interested in. Without daddy JC throwing Cisco’s money at them they basically fizzled.