Cloud is a strategic priority for Cisco. Or not!

CVG BU have apparently been culled in the last few days because it supposedly wasn't making any money. That's the Cisco Cloud and Virtualization business unit for those of us that struggle with all the stupid acronyms. CCTG has also had significant cuts, including the high profile dunking of Phil Harris, the VP of Engineering for that business unit. That's the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Technical Group. Hopefully the clues are in the names as I don't completely understand the responsibilities of each, but what I do know is that Chuck Robbins has repeatedly called out 'cloud' and indeed 'collaboration' as strategic priorities for the future of cisco. Yet, here we are with hundreds of very talented Software guys being booted out the door so that the Cisco spreadsheets and balance sheets are more digestible to shareholders and we raise the capital to give Patel and Singh their muli-million dollar golden parachutes.

Did Chuck not say that Software would be the new focus for the organisation going forward at the expense of traditional hardware routing and switching? Did he not call out his top 5 areas of investment of which cloud and collaboration were part of? Why then are we nuking software guys in the priority strategic areas instead of redeploying them to projects with a chance of making dollars? Has priority changed? Is Chuck a hypocrite? Or does his left hand not know what his right hand is doing?

Now you will have to excuse me while I dust off my resume. One way or the other I'm gonna need it soon.

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Once again Cisco are too late to the party and will try and buy some standing in the sector via acquisitions. It's not really working so far. Cisco motto is to try and buy success and smother opposition with their war chest.

The ONLY priority is to make the balance sheet more appeasing to the shareholders. Anything other than that is only garbage.

There is no money in cloud for latecomer Cisco. You only need a liason group for a partnership.

Not only did Chucky boy say software was the new focus, but Cisco laid off people from the teams that support the tools the developers use to store code in. How's that for priority. I heard that they got to take over managing another source code too on top of losing 10% of their staff.

Let's do more with less. Oh, wait, we can add contractors to replace that 10% right? Great, except that they may know the tools, but not how Cisco manages them, customizes them to enforce Cisco work flows, etc so they have to ramp up. That's ok, it won't take them too long. But in the meantime, the fewer employees are having to work "on-call" more often as there is less of them to spread it around and they're spending more time bringing the new contractors up-to-speed and doing less real work.

Makes as much sense as laying off Security and Cloud staff.

CVG is a pipe dream. How many execs have left this project? The engineers in the group don't even believe in the product.

Is CIS team still alive?

It is the same with security... Security is allegedly one of the hottest topics, the future and blah, blah, blah... But both in August and now security group has been hit heavily.

So much for trusting Chuck.

Cisco is going to do what they normally do when they fail in a given market space (in this case, Cloud): buy someone. But they are making room first.

Phil Harris was the most recent head of server development for the product formerly known as CallManager or UC Manager. His exit is interesting - what was said about him that you call it a "high profile dunking?" Was there a Rowan statement about it, and who is his replacement? Is there a reorg that collapses his responsibilities with some other team?

By the way, let's not confuse the word "Cloud" in the name "Cloud Collaboration Technology Group" with actual Cloud investment. It's called rebranding of their legacy cash cow portfolio and very gradual migration to SaaS sales model for core voice and video.

Also, when an exec says something is a "top priority" and there is existing investment in that space, it usually means a bunch of people are about to get fired. "Top priority" == "urgent need to stop f---ing up."

Yeah, Cloud, Collaboration, IoT, Security and Next Gen Data Centre were called out as the top priorities. He also said 5.5k redundancies. Not sure many believe that story either now....!

Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Cloud is a strategic priority for Cisco. Or not!

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