What is the strategy?
13 replies (most recent on top)
I think it's a great buy, just as enterprises such as KPMG do away with phones and move to mobile/cell phone only strategy. It's a bit like buying a pocket camcorder business just as mobiles incorporate video recording capabilities. I mean who would be that stupid?
Are Cisco just buying anyone willing to sell? It really seems that way sometimes.
because HCS for Contact Center is a goat rodeo , horribly ran and executed. Unfortunately the writing is on the wall for UCM, Communications manager, the best Voice Software offered today. Broadsoft can allow Cisco to finally offer a Cloud based CC option, not just a one off build by SP or managed group barely holding on. Interesting piece would be hardware, if possible to host on prem or provide true hybrid hosting, would provide a huge revenue stream for Cisco.
Basically because spark s---s, a failed attempt to re-discover IRC chat and Cisco attempt at UC OOT market and is basically what happents when someone tries to re-invent the wheel, UC/CC softswiching software takes time to mature, is not something you can get some one to start developing and have ready in some years , decent quality in UC is paramount and that is hard to get, most decent products on the market have more that 15 years of software dev behind them (i.e audo codes, sonus networks,avaya). Additionally broadsoft interworks with most of the currently on market 3rd party phone vendors and has Class 4 softswitching which they can sell as a product to ISPs
Because Cisco was threatened by the news of Avaya coming out of bankruptcy chapter 11 and Avaya would emerge stronger than ever in UC and CC market.
A Central Office in the sky, ahem, cloud.
History is repeating itself. We once had ginormous Central offices full of PBX switching gear. No we have VMs in the cloud- which oh by the way will sit in the same room as the ole pbxs. Oh yeah and it’s Cisco now. Just like Western Electric Circa 2018
There is no strategy. About 6 months after the closing of the deal, there will be an L1/L2 offsite to discuss strategy. By the time the All-Hands is done, there will be more talk about the strategy but the execution will be delayed at which point the BU's top dog will move to another position in San Jose and into another BU altogether. The new BU leader will talk about strategy and will pull together the L1s and L2s for another offsite and will not stop talking about how wonderful the offsite was while presenting a confusing deck of PowerPoint slides with gawd awful graphics that try to explain the strategy as pillars of the BU at the next All-Hands. The strategy will still be clear as mud and the BU Leader will solicit questions for the next All-Hands which will be in the form of a Strategy Q&A where the L1s will respond to each question with a canned/scripted response to "drive" the strategy....at which point the strategy will be so old and stale that it is irrelevant because the BU is flailing and gasping for breath and showing very poor numbers for 5 straight quarters..... and this will call for another discussion about strategy which will spawn another offsite....and so on ad nauseum or until Chuck and the ELT run out of patience and systematically close the BU using a clever euphemism like "Limited Restructuring" so it won't sound as bad as "lay offs".
Tech & Talent...took a competitor off the table and the only growth they can get in this space is through acquisition.
Because Cisco didn't want to erode the value of Call Manager, etc. They will milk that s---er for all its worth. And building a new platform from scratch - Spark Calling - didn't go so well. It seems the good engineers left.
So Cisco did what Cisco do best - they bought something with some obvious overlap, will deny there's any overlap, which, contrary to belief that customers are idiots, will confuse the stuffing out of the target market (SP's selling to SMB - they aren't THAT stupid), ultimately hurting both existing and acquired product sales/brand.
I heard Cisco are the biggest users of Spark Chat, and have had a lot of the features disabled due to stability issues. If they can't re-invent IRC, how the hell did they think they could re-invent Call Manager?
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And because somebody in top want to be promoted , this acquisition part of his achievement
Because Spark calling is garbage
Because we like to invest in deflationary markets and companies.
Cisco leadership felt they had a shortage of former Nortel executives within the organization so they decided to spend a couple of Billion $$$ to get some more. Most of the last round of ex Nortelers were purged out due to performance a few years ago. This is a refresh. The newcomers will fit right into the current Cisco culture.
Curiosity