Can anyone tell me what software Cisco sells that is market leading and will likely stay that way for the next 1-2 years? I'm racking my brain and struggle to see how Cisco is going to hold it all together and become a Software business with so many systems and platforms to maintain and develop, yet continuous LR's and a preception in the market as an insecure employer.
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As with cloud Cisco has left it too late to respond and before it realises, Cisco IOS will not be wanted.
The tipping point will continue to be incremental as more enterprises and SPs really realize they can truly rely on cheap SDN to replace end-of-support Cisco gear. Once the hardware footprint erosion gains momentum, the revenue side from software must incrementally take over. Does Cisco have a similar foothold in go-forward, "must have" SaaS; as it did in the old days of enterprises buying pallets of new Cisco hardware? Will be very interesting to see where all this goes over next five years.
Cisco's network OS is going to be made more and more irrelevant by projects like OCP & TIP (started by FB). They want to decouple IOS from HW as a last-ditched response to TIP which now has members in the hundred. Telecoms & web operators are starting to realize they can use their considerable expertise to build what they need leveraging OCP & TIP. Nobody cares anymore to build complicated networks. It's simply cheaper to put in bigger pipes. Cisco gotta learn from the server market. Expensive blades & storage are dying while commodity servers are growing. Thanks to open-sourced project like Hadoop. The world has moved on to AI, VR, etc..and yet Cisco is still talking about plumbing. Clueless from CEO on down.
@1jzn What you are saying is true. Cisco however would still try to be more software company anyway. Service provider network software and automation BU is working on the xr new project called Lindt, to separate hardware with the software (BGP, MPLS, Security, etc) from the underlying hardware. The premise is to sell basic box to customer and let them pay the software as needed as recurring revenue. This will attract small companies other than the big SP customers. Secondly, the BU hope to make the OS and the software feature of switch/router to run on any whitebox broadcom based chip to attract the Facebook, Google, Web companies of the world.
Changing a consumption model so that customers can transfer a software license to the next piece of Cisco tin they buy, does not make it a software company. The only reason they have created this model is to raise the barriers of entry for new competitors and to try to slowdown the bleed of market share they are losing. Cisco builds bespoke closed software to run only on its hardware. If it were to release an off the self networking OS that could run on any white box switch, that would make it a software company, but it will never do this as the revenues and the margins in hardware are so massive not to mention all the investment in its current supply chain model.
Saying Cisco is a software company, is like saying Ford is. Yes they develop software to make their cars run, but they are never going to sell you the software without the car and Cisco will never sell you their software without a piece of tin.
The only software application Cisco has is contact center. The rest is just embedded or network/system software that frankly at this point doesn't have much value. Blame it on the clueless ELT for lacking the technical vision to build a cohesive relevant application stack and for acquiring a bunch of hodgepodge cloud apps that don't integrate with each other. If the board is not so incompetent they would have split up the legacy hw/networking business and move into cloud/mobile/IoT. It's sad to see Cisco now becomes a 2nd tiered dinosaur.
SW company first? LOL. The first router was 30 yrs ago. Cisco may develop a ton of software, but the way our customers consume our products is by us shipping them a piece of hardware. Our entire supply chain is around hardware. Compare what we do with Microsoft. They ship software, you don't see windows requiring MSFT hardware.
Cisco has always been a SW company first. The first multi protocol router was all done in SW. Today most features customers pay for all done in SW (or firmware of NPu). SW feature set is what sets Cisco apart from just slapping down Broadcom chip.
It's even bigger than the sales force. All of the transactional systems are built for hardware. There is no longer any organization dedicated to developing software beyond Cisco ONE, which is just software on the same boxes. I don't see anything happening that will turn this company around. It's really sad.
Don't make me laugh. Cisco has some talented software developers and even some good nuggets here and there but it's not a software company!
You can't give an AM a $12m number and tell them to make it selling $50k software bundles with SEs and resources who only know how to sell hardware.
Yes, people will sell ELAs but it's not the culture of the company. Cisco is just a race-to-the-bottom commodity hardware player with some neat differentiators no one cares about.