As oracle is able to build a cloud, not sure why cisco couldn't build a cloud with all the network infra it has and UCS. Did cisco make a strategic mistake here?
15 replies (most recent on top)
@3mus+1bUIevby ahhh Rob Lloyd, quite the visionary indeed! He purchased a "professional ultimate frisbee league" that he's now leading. You just can't make up stuff like that. I don't understand how the board keeps repeating the same mistakes. How many ill-fated CTOs did Cisco hire or promote?
When Rob Lloyd was given the responsibility for Cisco's Cloud Strategy in 2013/2014, he decided that Cisco had to figure out how to inject itself between the customer and the cloud provider - this is what he called the Intercloud.
He was trying to run the Internet connectivity play incognito and failed miserably because no one was willing to pay a premium for legacy networking functionality that added no value to the customer/cloud connection.
In reality, at that time, it was already too late for Cisco to try and enter the cloud business. Cisco would have had to make a multi-billion acquisition to try to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft. Chambers questioned the valuations of folks like Amazon given that they weren't profitable and believed the cloud business would come back to the legacy IT players. His miss on cloud was his largest mistake as the Cisco CEO.
Cisco plays the shell game of marketing lingo as if service chaining and VRFs on some hardware = cloud.
In reality (and I work for a direct Cisco competitor), the major public cloud devices don’t even run on much Cisco gear underneath. Over time Cisco cut its own throat with all of their LRs and the employees that left.
Oracle are totally evil. They make stupid amounts of money by totally hating on their customers. The Ryanair of SV. They gouge their license fees and cash cow everything. Anybody that I know in tech with any financial prudence has had a simple edict for at least 15 years “No Oracle software — ever!!” But they have such an installed base, and it’s almost impossible to get them out of your company without spending 10’s or 100’s of millions of dollars.
The horse has already bolted. Cisco and cloud are usually not mentioned in the same sentence- except by Cisco sellers. It was once a great company that has been left behind in many regards. It is a shame though. We made a lot of money from selling Cisco back in the day as it was the choice of enterprise.
"As oracle is able to build a cloud, not sure why cisco couldn't build a cloud with all the network infra it has and UCS. Did cisco make a strategic mistake here?"
Oracle is one company that suc*ker than CISCO. They have done nothing but failures and political struggles lately.
The problem is that some employees believe Cisco is a technology. We sell & market legacy networking equipment. You can't expect a sales and marketing company to create products or implement new product features internally.
I was working on a service provider which attempted to implement collaboration cloud services. They acquired an IaaS provider and they tried hard to partner with Cisco and become a cloud player. It failed miserably. Partner went nearly out of business and ended up selling that division and laying off most people. First, Cisco wanted to price cloud services to users based on their licensing mode. Cost was prohibitive and no customer wanted to buy the solution. Also, I remember the Intercloud initiative was around $1B dollar investment. Another flop. In my view, failing in cloud is similar to Nortel failing to shift to the Internet Protocol. Fatal.
Cisco has always fall flat on their face when they try to build things in-house like Intercloud (see Insieme, IPTV, Cius, etc.). I always felt they should have partnered with one of the lesser clouds like IBM or Rackspace. Since they missed the boat already, I hope they won't double down on their mistake by buying a company like Pensando.
I was one of those who actually worked on Cisco Cloud strategy back in 2013-2014. Every opportunity I got to interact with executives, I talked about why and how. And every time I opened my mouth, I was silenced because what I proposed would ki-l the existing Cisco business.
Some of the witnesses were future CEOs who went on build companies such as CloudGenix...
Cisco is an elephant that has become too old and too fat to move. Big projects are ki---d by its own people.
Stay tuned..
I remember going to the “Intercloud” session at CiscoLive in 2014. That was the last time I heard about it.
https://www.crn.com/news/networking/300083157/cisco-officially-throws-in-the-towel-on-intercloud.htm
Cisco tried with Project Nimbus. It failed for three simple reasons. One: misplaced ownership. It first was developed by Cisco Services and then by Cisco IT, neither of which had the entrepreneurship attitude (or skills, or values) required to create and run something of that nature and size. Two: wrong technology. Nimbus placed its chips on Openstack. Three: a certain level of arrogance. There were good acquisition targets back then, but why acquire when we can do it in-house? Look how well that turned out.
Microsoft and Cisco have roughly the same valuation (May 20% less) back in 2007. Microsoft cloud strategy took that to $2T company, whereas cisco stuck where it is then. Wrong strategy.
Cisco did try to build a cloud environment back in 2014 and earmarked 1 billion for the endeavor. However, it didn't last long as AWS and Azure handed it to us. Cisco quickly canceled the project in favor of selling the gear required to make other vendor's cloud infrastructures.