Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Lol!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2017/02/09/this-surprising-rival-beats-ciscos-appdynamics-new-relic-in-2-6-billion-market/#2851be1f11b1

Not just Fool.....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2017/01/25/skip-cisco-stock-after-3-7-billion-appdynamics-buy/#5792c2267aeb

Any deal that take only 72hours to negotiate and is done hours before going public is never going to be good for the buyer. What a stupid waste of money. I think the ELT are getting desperate.

Motley Fool doesn't think the deal was good either: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/26/cisco-gambles-37-billion-on-software.aspx

Oh don't get me started. They are utterly useless in the UK! The worst thing is when they go to Sales Champion... what a joke. There is one PSS in EN who has all his Sales Champ wins listed on his signature..... it makes me feel sick to think how much these guys are making for chasing ambulances, carrying no pressure at all and being completely useless at their area of supposed expertise. The senior management should actually get out of Bedfont Lakes and visit a few customers with them to see for themselves what little value they add, as whenever I raise it I get shot down and told it's because I'm not utilising them correctly or the best one is "yes we know he's useless, but he's all we've got". Is this meant to be a business or a charity for failed account managers from other vendors?

PSS model is dead. Run it's time. Now needs a new model which gives resources back to front line. PSS are just ambulance chasers especially those in EN in the U.K. No technical skills. DC pss are same. Collab pss just need to get a life.

True about the PSS'. I don't think I've ever had one add any value to a meeting. They never go alone and basically try to do the AM role, but they don't know the customer. I say cut them all and use the head count to bring in specialist SE's. Although this is likely to never happen as people have built too many castles around themselves, hence why Cisco is now becoming more about politics and less about doing the right thing for the business.

If only I had a dollar for every time a DC PSS called me to ask when a deal was closing, which they never worked on, I wouldn't need to be working now.

Great last post. We should really kill if pss model and have more SE for credibility.

I can see how this is going to go. Cisco will add it to the DC architecture with Tetration, InterCloud, ACI and all the other stuff we just keep adding but can't sell. We will create some marketing spin to make out we have the answer to the end to end hybrid cloud approach, apart from the cloud part of course. Then we will give it to our second rate ex-HP box shifters called PSS' who know nothing about DC let alone cloud, to go and evangelise it with customer, by which they mean take a SE and sit in the corner quietly.

Cisco's revenues are on the brink of a big fall. NSX is already doing 10x the revenue of ACI, other competitors like Arista are accelerating and other alternatives are not far away from Microsoft, AWS and Facebook. It is impossible for Cisco to maintain its market share or revenues now it switching, so it has to start making bold acquisitions like this if it stands any chance of not becoming half the company it is today. I personally don't think our execution on integrating acquisitions is great and unfortunately I think this will become another Whiptail story.

Don't be fooled by the share price. That is a reflection of the belief Trump we provide a tax holiday and Cisco will pull its $60bn back to the US, where it will issue a large one time dividend and share-buy-back as Chuck has suggested.

AD staff have not been able to stop laughing since the deal was finalised. "You want to pay HOW MUCH for our company?" Lol. "You realise we have a very average product that is not unique and are not making any money, right?" "Ok, in that case, i'll gladly accept your generous offer!!"

Fools and their money are quickly parted.

It's a good buy if they can intergrate it, which I doubt they can, but they paid way over the odds for what it is.

It reminds me of a middle aged dad, going out and buying an expensive car, to prove to his son's friends, he's cool.

I'm pleased for my mates at AD who became millionaires overnight. They can't believe what just happened! Good luck retaining them Cisco, with your terrible culture!

Well they paid $700m for Acano, a company just about breaking even :-)

Containerx was a people hire...not for product

What did piston or container -x brought in to the table ?

$3.6B flushed down the drain. All those new Millionaires are laughing their A off at stupid Cisco ELT .. I smell fraud by the decision makers in Cisco .. they must have gotten their share

I used to know a kid who had a room full of unopened toys , games and presents . The ones that were opened were all mixed up with each other on the floor. His father , who he barely saw was always too busy to spend time with him so just showered him with things as a substitute. Just saying.

I p155ed myself when I saw this news! $3.6bn for a company turning over $150m pa...... I think the ELT either can't add or they have gone mad with an unlimited credit card. It's like Man-u going out and buying the 2nd divisions top striker for Premiership money. Sure he'll score a few goals, but by the time he retires you wouldn't have got anywhere near you money's worth. Good buy but at that money, utterly dumb!

The guys at AD must be laughing their heads off! It's a great product but not that unique and low barriers of entry. It'll return $2bn over 5 years for Cisco and then be dropped.

Another shocking decision by the ETL! However I'm sure it looks good to the markets, so will earn the ETL their bonus' which is all they care about ultimately.

appdynamics looks nowhere near csco core areas to me. 900 employees so not small. in core routing and switching areas the huge quality issues, chronic underfunding, people churn continue as usual ...

perhaps the bigger morale crusher has been no visible annual review anymore . no one has a clue how they are doing relative to others in similar role, where they did good, where they fell short or even what the expectation is.

"Cisco have stopped inovatimg" Cisco has barely ever innovatived, nearly all has come from acquisitions. Just go on their new hire and they run through them all. However the acqistions used to be a lot more aligned to Cisco's core business and intergrated well to give competitive advantage. Now most the acquisitions are beyond the core business as Cisco is trying to find relevance again with customers. Gone are the days you could acquire Layer3, add it to your switch and be interesting, customer don't care anymore. The problem

is though, when the company acquired is so far away from what Cisco knows, it tends to fail as did Whiptail. I suspect this will get added to the portfolio as a software add on to a switch, but the sales teams and SE's won't really know how to sell it, revenues will start to decline on it and eventually Cisco will stop developing it and let it fade away.

Cisco's offering is becoming way too broad. No doubt they are probably looking to acquire some analytics firm next to ad another sting. The problem is the more strings you add the hard the guitar is to play. Cisco should focus on its stregths and secure that business first. Instead it is loosing market share and revenue here and at the same time moving its attention to small markets like application performance, that won't make up the difference. Their strategy seems very sporadic and looks to me like they are flapping a bit.

Or leave them alone like Meraki???

One can hope. But that was the old leadership. This is the new leadership. I wouldn't hold my breath. The way things were going my last year there, I don't know if I'd trust the current ELT to be able to pour water out of a pair of boots if the instructions were printed on the bottom of the boots. :-)

Then again, they're smart enough to have gotten to where they are, and they all have golden parachutes, so who am I to say they're stupid. I knew I should have studied for my MBA degree so I could have promoted into the management career path, but I hated budgeting, forecasting, etc.

Or leave them alone like Meraki???

And they'll kill it like they did with Flip or Scientific Atlanta. They'll either shut it down or sell it off for a fraction of what they paid for it.

Cisco has stopped innovating and is trying to "buy" innovation but no longer has the skills to keep innovative acquisitions alive.

I find it funny how Cisco has stopped trying to disrupt the market and be a market leader and is now settling for "a predictable recurring revenue" from "software-centric solutions" according to their blog about the acquisition.

How many employees will Cisco be growing by? That's how many people will lose their jobs next year.

Good by or not....they paid almost twice the valuation given by analysts.