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Why would hardware development not be important to security?
by arbuge 10y ago
Why would hardware development not be important to security?
- philip1209 10y agoLong story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.
- mwksl 10y agoThat's a logical pivot; I'm slightly surprised they didn't try beefing up their extended support or doing a soft rollout first. Did they lay any groundwork or expectations for migrating their platform?
- mywittyname 10y agoYup. For a few years at least until business see the TCO and realize that these services aren't cost-effective at scale.
- fensterblick 10y agoIt's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its security/networking hardware.
- unethical_ban 10y agoIPS and URL filtering have always been a subscription model though.
- fairramone 10y agoIt's like this already -- you pay yearly maintenance fees for access to software upgrades. If you let it lapse and then want to re-enroll, you're still on the hook for the lapsed time. Maintenance fees typically don't include your support contract fees, either.
- williamscales 10y agoTo guess, I think it is because Cisco will pursue a strategy of software defined networking. That means more consolidated hardware development by fewer employees.
- jmspring 10y agoI don't think commodity hardware will fully replace all business of places like Cisco. For one, Cisco does have large contracts like the Chinese Government -- they helped build the "great firewall". I have no idea how this shakes out. But multiple companies in the traditional skew/license business are having to adjust (as others stated) to a different world.