Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

As an Aruba, HPE or Juniper customer, why would you buy anything from any of them until you see what is going to get canned after the merger?

HPE has always had a weird product lineup with odd limitations. They also don't provide useful documentation like everyone else does. At one point we were looking at access switches with some 10G support and PoE and their 5400zl looked interesting but the only documentation was that it ran 16.xx.xx. The OS didn't seem to have a name, there were no numbers on feature scaling, etc... Cisco's C9300s won that contract. The odd part is the architecture document showing some of the hardware features and limitations in great detail was found by a Google search leading to a third party site, not through obvious links on Cisco's website.

As an Aruba, HPE or Juniper customer, why would you buy anything from any of them until you see what is going to get canned after the merger? The revenues are going to hit a brick wall.

HPE has lost almost 14% of its value since January 8th. THEY WILL RULE THE WORLD!

Not exactly a Cisco Doppelganger. HPE has storage and compute, Cisco does not. HPE has HPC and AI that actually works and customers for those solutions - Cisco does not. JNPR+HPE can literally take Cisco's DC business as Juniper has DC switching and HPE has storage. Juniper has enterprise whose AI driven wifi actually work, Cisco does not. Juniper owns about 50% of the telco business already. If the HPE+JNPR merger works out then Cisco is toast.

"AI does not inflict massive investments in switching"

Whaaaaaaat??? But but ... that's not what the ELT seems to believe! AI is the next wave that's gonna fuel a massive gear purchase frenzy. Just like video was in the time of Uncle Chambers, remember? Splunk is today's Flip.

So two low margin companies, both in debt, taking on massive debt to merge with most of HPE's networking being redundant to what Juniper is doing, only gaining what Juniper does that HPE doesn't. Oh, and the deal may take another year to close so the process of convergence of different hardware and software product lines won't be starting for a while. HPE's was so poorly run that their revenues have dropped over the past five years.

Politics says HPE probably won't just dump Aruba and go all Juniper, but if they do Juniper is still shackled by new layers of management as well as the HPE corporate tax, and from the perspective of an investor Juniper's earnings will likely be diluted by the rest of HPE. HPE will still also need to support the old Aruba gear for its lifespan lest they torque off their existing customers. The article points out multiple times that sorting everything out will take years and there are perils along the way.

For Cisco, the only thing that really matters is "will this be the triggering event for Cisco to fundamentally change the way it does business and stop its auto-asphyxiation with technical debt so they can actually free up enough budget to tackle new technologies effectively?" I'd say with about 95% confidence the answer is no.

I remember 2018 or so, when Ruba Borno was assigned to bring together all AI initiatives within Cisco and put up a website on cisco-ai.com to showcase it after Chuck bombed on a question in the earnings call. It was a BS page full of nonsense, even the remotest Python code snippets were labeled as productive AI systems. One of the funniest days at the Cisco so far

I can’t believe that Cisco missed THAT boat too. After missing Cloud, SaaS, AND virtual meetings (during a pandemic when literally everyone needed it). Cisco has no innovation in AI, and unlike cloud, saas, and IoT, AI does not inflict massive investments in switching. That makes it hard to convince companies to buy their gear instead of AI software and/or GPUs

A merger like that is an opportunity for Cisco to come in and take market share if they misstep.

It is like to compare Sears with JCPenney. Both are a mess and struggling.

These people at Crisco have no clue. They’re busy making babies to bring their babies to working at Crisco.

Even somebody give Crisco a free AI platform, Crisco won’t be able to keep it up.

Look at current workforce at Crisco, it has been collecting Ju^nks workers since Covid. True talents would have any comprehension in AI have left.

Cisco missed out on buying Mist that was the key ingredient… now we play catch up but we are bloated fat potato couch that needs to make some lifestyle changes

Very insightful article.
Cisco AI is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Welcome to Chucky's dream dead house Crisco.