Am hearing Jen's was made a scapegoat and Spark call is all but finished? There's an argument that it was never started to be finished but whatever. It all seems a bit hush hush at the moment though.
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There's one website that has the headline, "Cisco Replaces Cloud Collaboration Unit Chief Amid Weak Sales" but I can't read the rest of it because it's behind a pay firewall. My Google-Fu shows no other mentions that Jens is out.
Apparently, like Cisco Spark, Jens departure wasn't that interesting.
@Q07cZEs-7bdw : Yes he did. Somebody had to take the fall.
Customer Care(contact) business unit will be targeted based on the overlap in product sets and target markets.
Soooo did jens get aced, or what?
Gotta love how RT was able to distance himself from the SPARK fiasco and left Jens to take the fall for his mess. That takes a certain amount of leadership quality.
I know very little about Broadsofts suite of Collaboration. Is it any improvement on Spark? Is there much of an existing customer base actually using Broadsoft?
Wasn't that when they bought Tandberg? Codecs and call control that didn't s---
Oh how history repeats itself. At least Tandberg's products had customers, unlike spark
Wasn't the acquisition of Broadsoft basically admitting - "We s--- at this and need to buy our way into the market."
Cisco is desperate to make Spark succeed before the rest of the Collab revenue drops off a cliff. They have massively overpaid for Broadsoft though. The best thing to do is to give Broadsoft to Meraki and let them develop a cloud based offering that competes against Cisco's traditional platform and Spark, as they are the only ones who seem to be able to make thes things work.
After 4 years of Spark, you observe your holding two 8s. The plan: double down - buy BroadSoft. Then rename it to Spark.
There's collaboration at Cisco?
The only collaboration that works at Cisco is the collaboration of the L1s, L2s, and HR folk who are putting together the lists and package details for the next round of layoffs.
Yes, Lens has been forced to walk the plank
The full argument from cisco towards its clientbase was, spark is the future on-prem is the past the rationalization although completeley incorrect was simple, faster features simpler product cloud base eco-system for partners to develop their on apps through an api, new endpoints and hybrid integration options to migrate for on-prem coexistence and eventually migrate everythng to the cloud, Instead of positioning spark as a competitor to other vendor cloud options like O365, they did it in a way that it competed agains it flagship collab products like CallManager, not only that they did not take any of the current collab product features, they just create a completeley new software from scratch with a verly low subset of features already present on other collab products
What they ended up doing was alienating most of their client base with buzzword gimiks and even clients that had previously invested heavilty on enterprise on-pre solutions the piches from the sales to the clients and partners was very low indepth technical reasoning and mostly (on-prem past and cloud future kind of talk) most of the technical questions raised by the partners and customers are still unanwsered simply because the product was not thought well, sure there are neat toys like spark board but that is ok for an exec or management, not enough to sell a subscription based sollution to a client when you have an on-prem alternative wich is much better, and so many other vendor cloud alternatives without a very strong difrentiatior.
If you use spark you can not let go of IRC it's 2017 people.
No! Not Spark. What will the world do without it?........ Oh yeah, no one will notice.