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The traditional enterprise IT ship is about to slip beneath the waves and Cisco wants everyone to know they have a sizable piece of wreckage to cling to. Not a

The traditional enterprise IT ship is about to slip beneath the waves and Cisco wants everyone to know they have a sizable piece of wreckage to cling to. Not a bad strategy. I find it funny that Cisco loves to paint itself as prescient when they're actually pretty erratic and consistently late. They're just huge, yet nimble enough to consistently make the podium in some sense. Cisco bought Tandberg as the world was moving on with Skype, Hangouts and Facetime. Cisco brought forth converged infrastructure as the world was shifting out of the datacenter. Cisco started making sizable investments in private/hybrid cloud in the last year when it would have meant a lot more in 2010. You've probably never heard of Cius, Quad or SDN (in relation to Cisco) but they were keynotes 4, 3 and 2 years ago respectively. >'And if you look at three years ago, Huawei, Avaya, and Juniper were the worries, and they were going to eat our lunch.' Cisco didn't fend off Huawei so much as the government blocked them from competing on the premise that China would do exactly what it turned out the NSA was already doing.

RockyMcNuts 12y ago
Unlike Wintel, even mobile/cloud still needs network equipment LOL. It's a pretty amazing business, when you think about how much you pay per Ethernet port to run your business, and how much goes to Cisco, and what it costs to make that equipment. Think about what you pay for a firewall, router, switch vs. a server. But software-defined networking seems like a paradigm shift that will be rather disruptive. Just makes no sense to buy all those firewall, router, and switch boxes, when they could all be virtualized and integrated (like VMware did to servers, and they want to do to networks with the Nicira SDN acquisition). Meanwhile, Cisco makes a lot of acquisitions, many of which seem pretty stupid: Scientific-Atlanta and NDS, just when cable TV is about to get its lunch eaten by over-the-top; Flip video camera (Pure Digital) just when it's about to become an iPhone feature (and I guess they couldn't turn it into GoPro) Then they bought back $70b worth of stock since the dot-com crash, distributed a rather hefty chunk of that to management. Enterprise value down to $96b. So...could be a great business but not sure it's a great strategy or great management.
contingencies 12y ago
Agreed. This is mostly marketing drivel. True story from this weekend: I have been setting up some Cisco branded devices. 'Hidden costs' were mentioned in the presentation... I found plenty with Cisco's stuff: the fact that their reams of documentation are almost designed not to get you moving, the fact that they insist on using RS232 console cables in this era of zero RS232 port availability, the fact that they constantly software-license features that complicate getting anything done, the fact that they want you to use some kind of ridiculous Java interface (that won't run on most versions of the JRE, on most platforms), the fact that their systems take minutes to tens of minutes to reboot despite being built for purpose... I'm sure I could go on. I've wasted hundreds of hours on Cisco kit in the last 20 years, and quite frankly I'm happy to avoid it whenever possible. Huawei is kicking ass, Cisco is bullshitting everyone in this presentation as far as legally possible.
mathattack 12y ago
There is a lot to be said for being the standard (or 800 pound gorilla) in a key market. Look at Oracle. They've made a ton of mistakes, but they are the king of relational databases, and the amount of data will only increase. We are in an age of increasing connectivity. The king can make it's share of mistakes.

RockyMcNuts 12y ago

Unlike Wintel, even mobile/cloud still needs network equipment LOL. It's a pretty amazing business, when you think about how much you pay per Ethernet port to run your business, and how much goes to Cisco, and what it costs to make that equipment. Think about what you pay for a firewall, router, switch vs. a server. But software-defined networking seems like a paradigm shift that will be rather disruptive. Just makes no sense to buy all those firewall, router, and switch boxes, when they could all be virtualized and integrated (like VMware did to servers, and they want to do to networks with the Nicira SDN acquisition). Meanwhile, Cisco makes a lot of acquisitions, many of which seem pretty stupid: Scientific-Atlanta and NDS, just when cable TV is about to get its lunch eaten by over-the-top; Flip video camera (Pure Digital) just when it's about to become an iPhone feature (and I guess they couldn't turn it into GoPro) Then they bought back $70b worth of stock since the dot-com crash, distributed a rather hefty chunk of that to management. Enterprise value down to $96b. So...could be a great business but not sure it's a great strategy or great management.

contingencies 12y ago

Agreed. This is mostly marketing drivel. True story from this weekend: I have been setting up some Cisco branded devices. 'Hidden costs' were mentioned in the presentation... I found plenty with Cisco's stuff: the fact that their reams of documentation are almost designed not to get you moving, the fact that they insist on using RS232 console cables in this era of zero RS232 port availability, the fact that they constantly software-license features that complicate getting anything done, the fact that they want you to use some kind of ridiculous Java interface (that won't run on most versions of the JRE, on most platforms), the fact that their systems take minutes to tens of minutes to reboot despite being built for purpose... I'm sure I could go on. I've wasted hundreds of hours on Cisco kit in the last 20 years, and quite frankly I'm happy to avoid it whenever possible. Huawei is kicking ass, Cisco is bullshitting everyone in this presentation as far as legally possible.

mathattack 12y ago

There is a lot to be said for being the standard (or 800 pound gorilla) in a key market. Look at Oracle. They've made a ton of mistakes, but they are the king of relational databases, and the amount of data will only increase. We are in an age of increasing connectivity. The king can make it's share of mistakes.