It's truly disheartening to see how Cisco is lowering its standards as the years go by. Once we stood for excellence, now we celebrate mediocrity because most of the best people have been pushed out. What's next? How low can we go in the name of cost-saving?
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Having been a customer of an ISP using Cisco gear in the first half of the 1990s when customers received announcements of all changes at the ISP where every week it was “we’re going to upgrade these Cisco devices” followed by “the software upgrade was too broken and had to be rolled back” it’s clear Cisco never had “technical excellence” on the software side. The software on the provider edge from a company Cisco bought was in complete failure more than 10% of the time yielding zero nines reliability. I went to Cisco in the early 2000s aiming for a customer facing architecture role and I quickly realized it would mean getting punched in the face by customers while getting stabbed in the back by engineering. Since the options were worth nothing it was clearly not the place to be.
I don’t think things have changed as much as you think.
When others company pivot, they tried to pivot into a growing market. However, Cisco is following the same path as Sun Microsystems a few years back. They also tried to pivot into software and subscriptions. They haphazardly scaled back on hardware/embedded systems and began to aimlessly sell SW/subscriptions while aggressively trimming their workforce. In the end, it blew up in the face.
Cisco's ELT is doing the exact same thing. They are following a bankrupted business model. What is the definition of insanity? That is doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
Cisco's Board decided that it didn't want to be an innovator or a technical leader when it hired another sales guy - a channels sales guy to boot - to replace Chambers. If you look at any technology company that has successfully transitioned into its next period of growth - say from desktop software to cloud (i.e. Microsoft), they put individuals with a strong understanding of the customer and a strong understanding of the technology into leadership positions to drive the new business.
Underneath Chuck the channel sales guy, the rest of Cisco's leadership are only required to pay homage to Fran. Customer knowledge and technical understanding are completely optional.
And whilst waiting for fixes from vendor, customers are witholding payment. Then they will complain when annual renewal is due saying that product didn't work for 6 months as required,
No. The problem is vendors releasing buggy software. Sometimes integrators are waiting months and months to close TAC cases and for patches/updates. Also, spending weeks and months "gathering evidence" for TAC. This is all burning hours for integrators. How can you make money like this? Not all products/services and features are like this, but many
The problem is integrators aren’t good at the technology so when they deploy it they make Cisco look bad. Really it’s that they cheaped l out, charged top dollar but sent bottom rung engineers.
toward the end of Joe's end of rule on TAC, he also lost his way, He hires Marine corp's sergeant and made him VP of Managed service, he cuts managed service like CMS and cloud big time, and eliminated all the people vested in the service. Due to Marine Corp's sergeant has no idea of what is cloud in reality, he was following the big Ian(architecture)'s direction and dump the cloud model and straight into site to site vpn and ship hardware to each site as the old way.. from what I know , we dumped cloud model as part of the cut. It shows we do need technical seasoned cloud team at top instead of just trying to band aid and stick to old solution.
As an integrator, Cisco have slowly lost the plot IMHO. The software seems so buggy from ISE to APIC-EM. You have to factor in 20% extra $ on a project to deal with bugs making it too risky to put into bigger sites. As an integrator- we are the ones that lose. We look stupid in front of customer recommending half working products and we burn hours trying to get basic stuff working that has been released into the wild with so many issues. It hurts me to say this but we are focusing on other vendors products and services now. We have been tight with Cisco for so many years since the 2500 series and X.25 protocol routers. I think all good things come to an end and the disruption of cloud has seen this once great company put band aids and duct tape solutions together to fit the new way of doing things. It hurts because we have invested so many skills of our employees into Cisco and we don't even get any leads any more from said vendor.
Culture starts at the top. You wonder why, look at the new crop of leadership. Mm , chuckie and the gals.
It's called a managed decline. Cisco sells legacy network equipment... we missed out on the cloud, security, and software.
In addition, we do not have the culture to create new products and services internally. Our brand is worthless which impacts our ability to acquire startups with growth potential.
@ubs+1bLhuPEY
Why it is gone? Simple: constant cost saving, engineers seen as cost factor and our exec team has no clue how tac works and what it does.
So you can't blaim people to run out. Or get sacked if from SJ or Sydney
This has sadly been a constant decline for the last 10 years where the last years with MM we went into turbo mode.
I could write pages on the decline and bring examples. But the bottom line is cost saving, trying to bill customers more and pay engineers less.
In late 1990s and 2000s, Cisco was all about technical excellence. Many TAC issue escalated and resolved by email aliases. It was extremely common to be flamed on an alias if you posted a question on the customer escalated without researching the issue beforehand.
The aliases were harsh on feedback at times as far as candid levels of responses, but many problems were fixed. Many times painful and exhausting to fix the many innovations of that time.
Nowadays, as a customer, we open TAC cases and get half-baked and unresponsive mediocrity. Garbage for the most part regretfully. Still some good TAC engineers out there but few and far between. Who can blame them, the old TAC "drink from a firehose" fix it customer first culture is long gone, absorbed into "social causes" philosophy.
A once great work culture. Gone. Why?