Love or hate MPLS, they were spun out and in repeatedly creating billion dollar Business Units. Cisco wanted to be the best in the world for the world. Chamber’s had birthday meetings. Cisco strived to he the human network, and a family. Chambers talked about market adjacencies, and new billion dollar businesses
Chuck takes over. MPLS quit. Now at partner summit, Impact, and live Chuck talks about DEI. Not technology. Zero new billion dollar BU’s. Fran follows up with hiring more diversity.
Chuck blames Covid for the drop in sales Then blames supply chain for the drop. Now Chuck says customers have a glut of inventory. How can customers have a glut of product not installed after years of delayed shipments? UCS nexus and other products were taking 6-9 months to ship.
Now in this RIF, tons of quality white overachieving males are gone. Technical talent, sales talent, tons of knowledge. Gone. Replaced with newly out of college and “Cisco certified” sales DEI hires are hitting the sales street as enterprise reps and techs
Customers who spent over 1m monthly in DC products, now are “hunter” accounts having bought nothing in DC in years.
Cisco was big enough that new AMs could wait by the fax for the order. Continue to RIF the sales people, new hires wait for the order,,, blame everything for the drop in sales.
Hide the GM drop by firing expensive payroll and replacing it with cheap DEI payroll. Blame top line on external forces.
Then realize you have a big problem. But splunk. Dirty secret. Software companies (like splunk) have a cost of manufacture software. Hardware companies (like Cisco) consider software on GAAP accounting as 100% margin with no cost.
So what does splunk do? It will raise margins and top line by blending Ciscos dying business with a new one.
Chuck will fire the aggressive white male sales reps and replace them with new college hires. The trend will continue. He will spend billions of money rebuying stock, issue more to the ELT and repeat.
Love Cisco. Hate Cisco. You can’t lose 4000 people, many many of them with 10, 15, 20 years of success at Cisco and expect the customers not to follow their trusted advisors to the new company.
Sure HPE is messed up, but with juniper they now have superior networking. Compaq proliants are still amazing. (Get a real storage company) and they are going to erode Ciscos market share on their 94-98% margin switching business.
I left Cisco 5 years ago. I carried a sales quota for 14 companies at over 50m. Now 8 of the 14 are “hunter prospects” accounts. I removed HPE and Dell from many of them. Two have now gone back to HPE.
Sorry for the rest who are there- get out soon. Sell the stock. The Cisco ride of valuation of 500B at massive multiples is way over. Now is a value stock paying a dividend. Chuck has a few years left of paying a dividend, and increasing it.
Chuck has moved to Atlanta. Cisco has 3
Sparkling new buildings and a EBC in Atlanta. San Jose and RTP are ghost towns of what they were.
The nexus BU is doing a roadshow to talk about ML/AI in nexus. Huh trying to bring back tetration?
Meanwhile MPLS sells AI/ML startup to intel. Ha! Cisco with AI. Might as well say they have more books and dvd than amazon does. Cisco has no future with AI. Facebook has more AI than Cisco does. Good by innovation. That is dead.
Note: I’m Not saying all DEI hires are bad, I’m not saying all RIFs are old white dudes nor am I saying that all white guys are successful. But in this RIF there is a massive amount of one class of worker who is gone.
What I am saying is Chuck has destroyed Cisco innovation. He has destroyed the family Chuck built. Chuck now just wants to hang out with Taylor Swift and other celebs while getting more stock, and hiding his failures with mega mergers that don’t work….
My LinkedIn is full of successful Cisco people who are let go, and also full of “I want to announce I’m a newly Cisco certified seller”. Yup a degree in sports from the local college, plus your Cisco selling cert means your an account manager. By title yes. You’re making 1/3 of those before you did, and in a couple of years, you will not have any sales revenue.
He-l I could become the new head coach of the chiefs next year, and I’m sure they would reach the playoffs. When we don’t make the Super Bowl, I’ll just say “3x has never been done”. And for the next few years the chiefs will continue to do good…. Until suddenly they are back to 3-13 and then I’ll leave blaming others…