Although Cisco is struggling to sustain it's high margin hardware business model, it's neighbor down the street seems to be crushing it despite Cisco's legal shenanigans. It's good for customers to have competitive options.
http://www.barrons.com/articles/arista-surges-14-q2-beats-q3-rev-view-crushes-consensus-1501792121
1 smart, 10 mediocre and 10 dumb?
Nah...
It is really this:
1 smart, 10 ready to lay off because they make too much, 10 back filled from some region paying 1/3 of typical salary.
It is all about the bottom line numbers, my friend. Engineering has little say at the ELT table.
What does it tell? It tells what many people already realized - that engineering org at Cisco is of very poor (and declining) quality. Most of the teams are built on a structure of 1 smart engineer, about 10 mediocre ones and another 10 contributing negative value. Essentially, these team are not staffed to innovate and build new products, but to do maintenance.
Only these acquisitions which are firewalled from this broken culture, have any chance of survival.
Agreed that Cisco has done this one quite well. It also gave Meraki the credibility it needed with the market to grow as it has. The only reason a lot of customer will even entertain it as an option is because they view it as Cisco kit. The reason they have intentionally kept the companies separate is to created an internal competitor, which is always better then an external one. It doesn't change the fact that Meraki isn't an alternative to enterprise products and will therefore never make up for the constant revenue falls the company is facing. I've heard that Cisco might take the IP from Meraki's cloud magement platform and offer it as an alternative to on premise management. For example, you buy a Cisco switch and can either buy it with on premise or cloud management. This unfortunately will destroy Meraki's market, as it will be viewed as a budget option to the really thing in the same way Linksys was, so the timing of this needs to be done carefully.
Meraki is one they haven't F'd up. A very strong offering and interestingly, with few exceptions, "Legacy" badged Cisco employees, non Meraki, do not have access to Meraki's SF facilities. What does that tell you?
Meraki is an SMB product and can't make up for Cisco's declining revenues of their enterprise grade products. Wireless vendors come and go like the wind. It'll be someone else eating Meraki's lunch in a few years time.
Meraki margins are killing it FYI
Let's see... n7k was created to replace Cat6k, n9k was created to replace N7k....
When's the Arista acquisition to replace n9k going to occur? I doubt both ACI customers will mind.
OMG I was just going to post on this. ANET up 20% today! Clearly a sign they are eating Cisco's lunch in the DC/SDN Switching space. Holy Cow...