what is our cloud strategy?

I am befuddled given the huge amt of messaging that csco should become a "sw company" and make money off "cloud model", subscriptions but do not see

what should be our top5 products in that space
who(which BUs) are going to build them
in what timeframe
how much money each is expected to make - this is a must given our huge cost structure and is routinely done for any HW platform.

all I see is people making "visibility" noise on internal mailers on using open source stuff as if thats going to make us any $$ . a set of people seem to have successfully parlayed this open src hype into lucrative pe/de plays , keynotes, conferences, contact building for the next gig as well..never mind none of these projects will ever make a dime.

to me it seems there are 4 main areas one could play in:

cloud applications : these are applications like HR or analytics or whatever that will run on bare-metal or virtual machines. csco has no real history in building enterprise applications and many other strong specialized cos exist incl IBM, sap, oracle, workday, bea , salesforce etc etc. only in security & wan gateway perhaps we have credible virtual appliances, maybe in NFV now.
cloud infra
hypervisor - we own no hypervisor and vmw esxi/kvm/hyperv are mostly free except for support
cloud networking - we have one product called nexus1000v - I believe its free barring support.

none of these two sub topics look like big $ to me.

containers - we bought containerX - but pushing virtual apps into containers is not a soln on its own, just one tool in a swiss army knife. none are going to pay for it as a "product"
cloud orchestration
we are not a public cloud provider unlike the biggies azure/google/aws/ibm et al - so no chance of a big internal customer to take our product offerings and deploy+validate for the world like perhaps goog did for kubernetes before open srcing it to increase the chaos level and hurt others.
families of tools and projects exist open src whether it be mesos, kubernetes, openstack, opendaylight etc - so why would anyone pay for anything , or what addl could be build on top of that which gets us revenue
cloud hw
all public cloud providers prefer low cost open srced servers and switches than touch branded gear. as enterprise IT is being hollowed out and migrated to providers so it hits our traditional market
ACI ? someone needs to fix their UI which is a decade+ behind vmware ...

did I miss any money making opportunity above?

to me it seems unless one is a big public cloud provider operating on a global scale, its nearly impossible to make money as none would like to buy standalone bits and pieces cloud sw/hw when all have internal teams and access to open src for the same.

if its so tough to make money off "cloud" , why dont we have a clear top5 product strategy thats visible to the troops?

imho nobody has a clear idea on what to do right now and its possible all these efforts will come to naught and csco shrink down to a traditional L2+L3 company which it was in mid 90s.

maybe Biri was supposed to come up with a grand plan ... :(

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Maybe we need a CTO? Oh right, we already have about seven of those. Sorry, Biri, six.

This is right on. This so clearly says what I have been feeling. This is the dilemma we face. We are software, with no coherent software plan, and cloud with no cloud role.

@ nvq - The value is to the shareholders only. Cisco gets to use that stockpile of money they hold offshore, create some spin, pump up some Wall Street a-holes and increase/hold dividends without ever hiring a single person.

I've seen this a 100X before. The challenge is not spending money on the next shiny object, its making it all work together. On that many including Cisco have failed miserably.

You are no the only one who is confused, check out the following from the WSJ

http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/10/18/the-morning-download-cloud-computings-hazy-meaning-creates-confusion-for-cios/?mod=WSJ_TechWSJD_cioJournal

One more collab play Worklife acquired...lord alone knows what value these small buys bring...

Then there's IoE ...err, I mean IoT. what's our play here? It seems we're all over the place.

I am shocked by your post , are you telling me that after 2 Billion Dollars of funds going in to "Intercloud" we did not come up with anything ?

Also don't forget that Cisco is hiding behind , WEBEX ,as it is Cloud Based, Spark is Could Based , so on & on , so for a coherent message as to how Cisco is going to "cloudify" its offerings forget it. This is a question all the Tier one carriers are asking and not really getting a response beyond broad brush responses.

Also as Opensource does not necessarily mean free, cloud based solution do not mean thin margins per se. it very much depends what you are offering and what problem it is solving.

BTW this is what you get from getting hardware boys/girls trying to get their head around software, virtual and cloud all at the same time , Deer in Headlights ?!

Wow, you put more thought into it than the ELT. Congrats!

welcome to the cloud world... one thing many overlook is that this means razor-thin margins - and an organization like Cisco cannot continue to exist with those.

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what is our cloud strategy?

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