Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Not only that, how will he sell spark in EMEA with 1 or 2 European ISPs for PSTN breakout, don't they understand customers will not accept this?

Ah perhaps dialing out the PSTN is also outdated and a thing of the past,

Wait but we have spark hybrid, you can use your own pstn access, yeah why should i when i can have expressway with MRA, to use a Internet Video CFB? that should be interesting the QOS using internet which is by definition not qos oriented, the video quality should be top notch ...

Cloud should be a choice not something that you are forced into taking in account the disadvantages it brings to real time applications should be pondered carefully. ON Prem sollutions for collab have a long track record of adequate quality, why force this saas b---s--- with agile (bug heavy) fast developmen cycles with no software quality controll. they will never get better revenews with this, the client will not buy it the smaller clients are not interested in paying a fee regularly for a glorified IRC software with sub-par PBX features.

@2vytk - but Slack is so cool. Most vendors use it.

All the former engineering management that have now taken over the SP Business unit are refusing to use Spark and are mandating that everybody use Slack. Whilst nobody is in favor of making us use internal platforms if they are not fit for purpose, but in this case Spark is perfectly suitable. Should not be allowed

@qpnv - thanks, that made me smile. Was like looking into a crystal ball

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U-n1vg36ffs

Main problem is that everybody except the ELT know they are backing the wrong horse. I don't see this ending well, but sincerely hope I am wrong.

Maybe Spark board will be the saviour? No, wait. That's absolute rubbish. Didn't even work for the big unveiling demo at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. How embarrassing was that. Cringe! Had to watch it through my fingers it was so horrific. Maybe the have some other aces up their sleeves. Let's hope so or a few more quarters of negative numbers and we will be getting very uneasy.

A real shame. Or is it a sham. God only knows. All in with something that no one wants to buy. How many $$$$$ being spent which would otherwise fix other mature needed products?

@elyr - Not sure how long you can ignore the fact that nobody is buying Spark? As you say, you can turn a blind eye to the elephant but you cannot ignore the smell - and it reeks! It was a very risky strategy from Rowan to go "all in" with Spark but when/if that strategy fails he will either move to focus on the IoT portfolio or else get a nice soft landing complete with golden parachute. He can't lose really.

The collab group is a ticking time bomb, Spark s---s, the managers know it, but they're all pretending the elephant doesn't exist.

WebEx works great, customers love it. It's making money! By Cisco logic its definitely time to ignore it in favour of Spark. Craaaaaazy!!

I'm one of the Cisco WebEx people that was let go over summer. Along with that cutback, I understand they declared WebEx to be 'feature complete,' so they can focus on Spark, ultimately to transition WebEx to the Spark platform. To me (and others) this is code for "transition WebEx customers to Spark."

Cisco is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. WebEx rocks. It is immensely configurable and has all kinds of subtle features / adjustments that will never survive a transition to a new platform. Sure, WebEx could use some attention (such as single sign on) - nothing insurmountable, but things are piling up because resources are being spent neutralizing Slack (which is overrated). Customers are happy with WebEx, it's sticky, it makes a lot of money, and of course it is the market leader. But with this transition to Spark, the WebEx customers are facing a forklift changeover anyway, so they might as well look at all available alternatives, especially since Spark isn't compelling yet. It's a heartbreak for me and many others who are proud of WebEx. I'm glad I won't be there to see it.

Having once been Cisco and now at a large company that uses Cisco Collab i can tell you the Spark story is horrible. They send the Executives to talk to company executives about how great it is. Then when the technical discussions come up there are so many holes in the solution it's not even funny. They basically want everyone to move all video units to the spark cloud. here's the problem. No coverage in Asia, very little in Europe. Also no clear answer on Hybrid solutions (other than its on the road map) Funny part is the back end is currently Webex CMR but from my sources they want to move everything to acano back end. Webex is the cash cow for them right now. And there's LOTS of truth around the fact that massive changes to the platform are all but impossible due to the old core code being finicky and no one left that knows all its' secrets. I think the thing that says the most is i have yet to find a cisco PSS that can actually explain the cost model. Or how does it work for those that have a huge Webex/CMR contract. It sounds like they think we should just buy another huge contract for spark on top. Yea that doesn't fly. And if you have Jabber,, well there's another case of no one knowing how that's ever going to play with Spark

@2dmd

Obviously I used the full Cisco suite of products while I worked at Cisco, whereas my current employer is an MS fanboy and uses Skype for Business. They're also Cisco fanboys, but not when it comes to presence/IM/most aspects of telephony.

I don't like it. Messages don't seem to get to the recipient occasionally, Audio quality is a bit crap (using a USB headset), and the stupid skype icon flashes in the taskbar for no reason at all (e.g. I'm in a call, not receiving any IMs, but it flashes... why?). I can't seem to present my desktop anymore, I just get an error. The Windows Phone client is an absolute steaming pile of excrement.

Jabber and Webex was far superior. Only thing I didn't like was that IMs weren't saved - but I think that was a configuration option, so whatever Cisco IT had set it to. Though (in my time) Jabber on Android was a bit useless too IIRC.

If I want to make a proper phone call I just use my Cisco IP phone. At least it's reliable.

Spark is OK. It is catching on. Just not sure about the pay model. There are too many others out there that can do as well for little to no cost. WebEx, despite the warts, is very solid compared to competitors, and especially compared to the freebies. Will they screw it up when they try to integrate it? Probably, seeing as how some PM will shove it out in a half-baked agile sprint.

Back to our ELT. Someone said: "Attract, hire, retain" This is where ELT is letting us down, and The Beat showed it. Basically the message is, "Be happy, we are. What's wrong with you? You should be happy! If you are not, leave."

Well, a young star in our department left yesterday. Took up the offer. An under 30, smart as tacks engineer with all the skills they want.

You can't retain by just throwing out RSUs to brown nosers. You can't retain by saying, "Be a high performance team" and then splitting the team up among 3 geographies. You can't retain by creating awards that only go to the top %0.01 of engineers, and give the %99.99 a lecture on "you should be excited, what's your problem?"

Their idea of taking care of employees is to create a marketing slogan, and then throw them a few days off to work at a non-profit. Wow.

I really like WebEx. Apparently under the hood it is a mess of several million lines of code that the remaining WebEx guys are afraid to touch but as a product it works well. More importantly, customers like it and WebEx is still growing.

I also really like Jabber. It's taken a while, and a few reincarnations to get a decent XMPP client but at least now we've got one and are shifting millions of licences. Customers like it. Not sure how it compares to Microsoft's Skype for business but I'm sure somebody here will have tried both.

CallManager has been a big part of Collaboration revenues for a long time for on premise customers. It's big, cumbersome and horrible to upgrade but it gets the job done. Customers put up with it because once it's running it's good at what it's supposed to do and it's reliable.

Spark I have been using with 16 months and I'm still not sure about it. Sure, it has all these chat rooms but you could also do that in Jabber with an on premise IMP back end. It's supposed to reduce your email, which it does, but you could literally spend your entire day in Spark rooms sifting through mostly useless crap. Spark is also hugely expensive, but worse news is that customers are not taking it. That should tell it's own story.

Spark board, the 4500 dollar (plus monthly licence fee) Collaboration board. We have a few in the office meeting rooms to mess with. Suffice to say they need work! Proximity doesn't work. Sharing is pretty hit and miss. Switching between whiteboard and share is very buggy. It's just not a good experience at the moment. Hopefully that will get better because at the moment it's unsellable.

So we have some decent products for the on premise enterprise that Cisco is deprioritising in its big push to the cloud. Spark is where the leadership team believe he money will come from to replace it but we are seeing little evidence of that being the case yet. Hopefully they know something we don't otherwise the new 3 or 4 quarters could be very bumpy in Collaboration.

Part of having the "right idea" and providing leadership is the ability to understand the needed talent, attract and hire, and then retain that talent.... so, no leadership does not have the" right idea."

Agree 100% with that.

... the Collaboration group has cut their investment in WebEx to focus on Spark. The last round of layoffs hit the WebEx team particularly hard, so there are few WebEx resources left in Cisco.

I don't get the attraction of Spark. Web-Ex was a virtual meeting application that you could use without having to have TelePresence. Spark is more of a persistent IM/Chat tool. I think it allowed you to make calls, but no one I know ever used it that way. Spark is a poor clone of Slack. I've used Slack for free for a small group of people who were organizing an event. It seemed to work just as well as Spark, so why pay for it? I can see paying for Slack/Spark to have an on-premise implementation to keep your intellectual property secure, but aren't they both 'cloud' based?

Other than some bugs with each Web-Ex upgrade, Web-Ex beat the other competitor's products that I've used for meetings with other companies by leaps and bounds. All too often, you'd try to join a meeting at the start time only to find out that it won't launch because your Java version is obsolete and you have to upgrade it and reboot to complete the installation making you miss the first 20 min or more of the meeting.

I interviewed with a company that was using their own product that's supposed to compete with TelePresence. My interview was using their product from their local office to interview with someone in CA (not SJC). The buffering and pixelation was terrible. I was NOT impressed and was glad they didn't make an offer.

I hope if Web-Ex dies at Cisco, that they at least sell it off to someone who can make it better and not let it die completely.

And, an idea is only right if the customers are willing to pay for it. What new collaboration products have been successful from a revenue perspective? Spark is supposed to be the innovative new product that replaces the legacy on-premise and cloud products. The next 12 months will reveal the truth. If Spark revenue doesn't take off by the end of FY17, then their ideas - and Trollope - will have failed.

@Kt9c0T8-2kcf. "I do believe leadership has right ideas"? Are you kidding me? Substantially killing the base that is generating revenue and focused so much on the cloud. Where is the message of listening to our customers? Or is this listen no one and do what they think is best. I hate to work with the same company that you work for base on your belief of great leadership and poor excuse of a "inherited wounded animal". Leaders listen to their customers, provide guidance and turn the ship around. Isn't it the reason why they were hired and being paid well? Might as well follow the same strategy of Cisco current hiring by hiring lower grade and get lower values. We paid premium for leaders and expect return on those premiums.

+1 with @Kt9c0T8-2rai

Spark was the "right idea"?

Part of having the "right idea" and providing leadership is the ability to understand the needed talent, attract and hire, and then retain that talent.... so, no leadership does not have the" right idea."

I don't blame Trollope. He inherited a wounded animal. The issue for me is lack of technical leadership. Best engineers gone. I do believe leadership has right ideas. Not sure we can implement.

Collaboration's downward trend isn't temporary. The only reason Collaboration revenue had gone up the past 2 years was due to the hardware refresh cycle that was kicked off with the new TP models. That refresh cycle appears to ending, based on Chuck's comments in the earnings call. The new cloud products are not generating enough revenue to offset the decline in the on-premise systems. Sales is supposed to put Spark first. But, Spark sales are non-existent after 4 years.

To make things worse, the Collaboration group has cut their investment in WebEx to focus on Spark. The last round of layoffs hit the WebEx team particularly hard, so there are few WebEx resources left in Cisco. WebEx is still growing but that won't continue due to the lack of focus by the Sales team. If WebEx revenue begins to slow down or decline, then the revenue drop in the Collaboration group will accelerate.

That will trigger the exodus of the Three Stooges (Trollope, Rosenberg, Meggers) as they move on to greener pastures. Unfortunately, that will leave the Collaboration group in a mess.

Somebody mentioned Barry O'Sullivan on here but what ever happened to him? Politics squeezed him out I assume? Take the golden parachute and fade into the night?

... but we must trust our leadership team to deliver and be successful.

You can trust them. I don't. For years, when Cisco was most successful, there were no annual lay-offs. Now the leadership keeps saying we need to cut costs here and we'll use the savings to focus there, but next year, there isn't any better and now it's the place getting cut in order to focus somewhere else.

If leadership needs to cut operational expenses, how about decreasing their bonuses? It's their decisions that got this company to where it is, so why do they deserve bonuses when people are losing their jobs?

Collaboration is still a billion dollar business for Cisco so it's not ALL bad. It just is going a little bit backwards at the moment but we must trust our leadership team to deliver and be successful.

From another thread here, Trollope is no class act, he's as incompetent as the other execs. Collaboration sales have been falling for 6 months. The new products are failing. No major customers signed up for Spark and daily usage is flat. Yet, they keep doubling down on failed strategies to save their skins. The "Three Stooges" (Trollope, Rosenburg and Meggars) who lead the Collaboration Group will likely all be gone within the next 12-18 months.

Rowan Trollope also has responsibility for the IoT business so I agree with the previous poster that he will likely transition people off the sinking collaboration ship onto the IoT lifeboat where they will paddle along for a few years not making any money, before jumping onto the next buzzword market.

Don't worry. Collab will take massive cuts by next August and they'll pile all the reqs into IoT bullshizzle or some other nonsense. The Canadian Hipster will move up the ranks - again - and leave Jens Meggers to keep putting more post-Barry O'Sullivan cronies in positions of power and sending the old hands packing.

Kill the stuff that works and replace with half baked things that no one want. Super strategy. Congratulations. High five time.

Call manager , desk phones jabber and webex were responsible for growth. All pre date the hipster's arrival. He has invested in spark his vanity project to the detriment of everything else and so far it has not worked. 4 years and the clock is ticking