Cisco's Biggest Threat

...is not Tariffs.

It is immigration policy (H1B expirations, deportations and fear). Cisco is shifting to India. If you doubt this, look at the internal directory.

It is the failed RTO. Cisco's bread and butter is failing.

Cisco sells network gear (think "switchports"). How many switchports do you have at home? 5 maybe? Are they Cisco? probably not.
But I have a Linksys, that's Cisco, right?
Nope. Cisco sold Linksys to Belkin in 2013 and Foxconn bought them. Linksys is a Chinese company. The Linksys fiasco is a good example of what is going on now, poor management decisions.

Offices are empty and the ones that are being refurbished are not putting Cisco switches in. HPE, Aruba, Juniper, Arista, Huawei, Palo Alto, Fortinet, are all in play.

Juniper and Aruba are being chosen for wireless which, let's face it, is how you connect. (when was the last time you plugged a cable into your laptop?)

But the biggest threat is Cisco ELT chasing the shiny AI object over a cliff.

to be clear Cisco is not going anywhere but they are a shell of their former self. CCIE used to be a golden ticket, now it's a literal joke.

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Big threat to many tech companies is "good enough". Yes, there are some extreme use cases that will require cutting edge hardware, chips, etc., such as carriers and cloud providers.

But for the vast majority of the SMB/enterprise/government market tech, (not just networking) has gotten sufficiently "good" that buying from any decent vendor is sufficient enough that there is no need to spend extra for a premium vendor such as Cisco.

Another example - Teams vs. Webex. Is Webex better? Sure...but not worth the extra cost or management to buy when Teams is "good enough" for the vast majority of users.

D Wagger "liking" his post 33 times. Very productive day!

Cisco will last many more decades. It is the bread and butter of internet infrastructure.

Juniper lost the battle long ago and are joining HPE, another big loser, to take on Cisco.

Cisco support and range of products are the best. Of course they are bugs in every software. Go check out Aruba cloud, it is buggy and pods crash every now and then. Cisco has 45-48% of wlan market. MIST has good AI for troubleshooting but Meraki has already caught up with MIST.

Outsourcing thousands of jobs to Asia just like all the other big tech won’t help cisco. Customer support and local talent will suffer and no proper pipeline for future talents here in USA.

Let’s see what happens. They paid $27B for a company (splunk) that is worth only $5-6B.

Hold the CEO responsible for all the mis-steps. No accountability for this marketing CEO. Replace him with a technical CEO, if possible.

"Juniper and Aruba are being chosen for wireless" well yeah, management gave our world class Cisco Wireless to Meraki to dismantle as someone said in another post, there's no surprise here ... I guess except to Cisco's amateur management team.

Cisco's quality has been extremely poor for more than THREE DECADES which is why they spent well over $100,000,000,000.00 not adjusting for inflation on acquisitions. This predates major H-1B and offshoring efforts and far predates any DEI.

Cisco's development budget is wasted mostly on failing to deal with technical debt with the remaining part creating more technical debt. This has been the root of Cisco's biggest problems for most of its existence.

Neither Cisco nor any of the dwarfs you mentioned can tolerate the lack of margins of the toy makers, and the toy makers are too poor to develop the high touch features required to eat the next layer up which would be the campus access layer. Linksys isn't even a toy maker now.

Cisco's problem: too many problems!

Microsoft is laying off 10%
(don't fall for the 3% propaganda)

https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/13/As_Expected_Microsoft_Uses_Media_Operative_Jordan_Novet_to_Down.shtml

Cisco will be 10-15%

Ciscos biggest threat is itself. Social justice is not a business plan. Stay in the boardroom and out of bedrooms, livingrooms and personal lives. It has been a big and critical mistake this organization will never recover from. Makes me sad having dedicated 16 years of my life for this result.

In case you are wondering what is more valuable than a Cisco cert. There are many
For AI building a strong foundation with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure (even CompTIA Cloud+) will be much more valuable

For Security, a broad swath of vendor neutral certs are so much better than Cisco (who is still a running joke in the security world)

CEH, GIAC, CompTIA Security+ are great
CISA (auditing of IT Systems)
CISCM (Infosec management)
CISSP (Global standard for IT Security pros)

Project management (PMP) is becoming way more valuable as managing projects is becoming a lost art (AI slop virtually guarantees this)

if you are in networking (or want to be for whatever reason) then getting the Cisco CCNA is still a good choice as it will check a box on lots of job reqs. after that, the CCNP offers diminishing returns.
the Fortinet Certified Associate is a good choice, as is Palo Alto. in fact any other vendor is a better choice to augment the CCNA.

the best bet is getting vendor neutral security certs or the foundational AWS, Microsoft and Google certs since these will prove to be much more valuable than going too far down the Cisco rabbit hole.

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Cisco's Biggest Threat

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