Cisco Names Veteran Robbins To Succeed Chambers as CEO 32
bledri writes: After 20 years as Cisco's CEO, John Chambers will step down this summer. The search for a replacement took a committee 16 months, and they selected Chuck Robbins, who was previously responsible for the company's global sales and partner team. From the article: "Wall Street analysts said a change was expected and could signal a refocusing of Cisco, which acquired dozens of companies under Chambers but has failed to make great headway outside its core networking business."
Maybe it's a sign... (Score:3)
Cisco seems, for the most part, to have the best balance of features in their basic infrastructure grade switches, and seems to have the broadest product line in all of their managed switches. For certain specific features other brands may perform better (thinking cut-through in Brocade vs more traditional store-and-forward) and other brands might have less expensive managed gear, but the feature set seems well balanced.
Cisco tried to get into end-user peripherals like the video conferencing and telephone handsets, and they've made inroads into servers, but there's either not a lot of interest (video conferencing) or a hell of a lot of well established competitors already in the market (servers), or they're chasing a product line that's more of a solution looking for a problem (why replace functional, paid-for phone systems that work independently of the LAN's problems?) and I don't see them getting the adoption that they want.
I wish they'd fix some of their existing products. Make Prime actually work right for switches, instead of being so AP-centric. Get Jabber to work on more platforms and get it to work independently of the handset phone so that it actually does something that the existing phone systems don't do. That sort of thing.
Maybe they've reached peak-Cisco, there's just not enough demand to grow the company anymore even with these attempts at tech.
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One big challenge for Cisco over the next few years is that a lot of their revenues come from their core networking products, where they have historically been able to sell hardware at a very substantial mark-up and add lucrative support contracts on top. It seems this industry is inevitably going to be severely disrupted sooner or later, with increasing use of consolidated hardware and virtualisation technologies, the potential advantages of software-defined networking once the tools are good enough, and a
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Cisco is all about software defined, from the Nexus 1000V (full on virtual), to the fact that every single Nexus switch sold today can be controlled through a robust REST based API Cisco has bought the software defined religion. The issue for them is that if you take away their special sauce then you can get 90% of the performance for 10% of the cost and probably 5% of the annual support costs through merchant silicon. Then again as a midsized enterprise I have zero need for a software defined featureset (t
Re:Maybe it's a sign... (Score:4, Interesting)
REST apis at ciscso are a joke.
sdn at cisco is a joke (they cancelled onePK. oh, and they didn't really tell anyone, either, but it IS cancelled).
disc: I used to work there. key terms: 'used to'
cisco is a has-been. and most of their really good people will leave in the year, as cisco removes all cubes and goes full retar^Hopen-office-plan. no one was excited about that and people said that when their building converts over, they'll either work from home or quit.
I remember cisco from the early 90's (I was there at menlo) and cisco today is a shell of what it used to be. they have too many people, too many projects and too much dead project (and old code!).
hell, when heartbleed came out, it took cisco over 6mos to get a working ssh daemon and even then its still broken with latest linux and putty opensl libs.
they do some things right, but too much else is done wrong, there.
pity, but they have definitely passed their prime, so to speak. canceling onePK was a huge loss even though it was complex as hell. now, their sdn story is weaker than all the rest.
and don't get me started on that csr1000v piece of shit. lacks too many tools and is not reliable (from what I've seen when I played around with it). don't get me started on their bad snmp, netconf and bazillion variants of the 'cisco classic cli'.
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Aren't they already getting squeezed?
There are more than a few decent layer 3 switches with command sets nearly Cisco config compatible that don't require the high-dollar smartnet for support and then companies like Juniper at the high end.
Most places where I see Cisco switching deployed could have gotten away with most anyone's switching product and gotten the same performance and they barely tap the feature set and certainly not to the point where they're doing anything Cisco specific.
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There's certainly competition in the market already, but for the most part the alternative big-hitters like Juniper still seem to be operating in the same kinds of market as Cisco today. Tomorrow, I think the markets themselves will be different.
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Cisco's VoIP desk phones are very popular. It's great being able to run a single type of cabling when provisioning an office.
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Because some facilities, like SCIFs, require cabling?
(SCIFs still don't allow cell/smartphones, right? I remember I was even told Furby toys weren't allowed in them.)
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Haha try having an office of 100 people trying to work with everything on network drives on a wireless network.
Cisco... (Score:2)
Oh. Hey. Cisco kid. Was a friend of mine. Until that beetles in the bog thing. Yeah.
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Why use switches instead of hubs?
Wireless has a much larger collision domain than wired with additional issues like hidden nodes. That among other things like RFI in the ISM bands makes wired more reliable and faster. Wireless is only more convenient.
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I suspect that there's only so much that can be done without the router simply ceasing to function, and as fine as modern electronics manufacturing has become, physically tampering with the electronics is
Dear Cisco, please die already. (Score:1)
I've been designing, implementing, and supporting various Cisco products in large enterprise settings for years... The only thing that is consistent is that the quality and interoperability of their products continues to decline. This decline is backed up by their 'crack' Indian support team that is skilled in running you in circles for months before finally capitulating that their product is in fact broken and that it MAY eventually be fixed - if you're lucky before the product is end of life'd and you hav
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It actually has alot more to do with the fact that their business units are competing with each other rather than just with their external customers, and that's tripping them up quite a bit.
That being said, the other vendors aren't any better.
I'm a network operator for one of the largest networks in North America, so I get to deal with all the vendors top end networking gear. Our name is such that, when we call for support, we don't get any bullshit, and I tend to get my RMA's in the 4 hour window, no matte
This always works out well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you are not sales, then you are overhead.
17 year Networking guy here.... (Score:1)
And is in many ways like MS, just better.
Any mid to large customer should be getting 50-62% off retail, so their pricing is not that terrible. Although their licensing has to be a real money maker.
For the past number of years I've thought Juniper was going to really snipe Cisco, however that just hasn't bore fruit.
HP and all the whitebox manufacturers seem to have carved out some nice niches for themselves, however I still haven't run across anyone of size not running Cisco (aside the Goog's
A monopoly that doesn't know it. (Score:2)
"...could signal a refocusing of Cisco, which acquired dozens of companies under Chambers but has failed to make great headway outside its core networking business."
Well heaven forbid that kind of activity should be a signal to regulators that perhaps they should look to follow their own damn anti-monopoly laws and stop massive entities from buying up "dozens" of companies just because they can afford to.
Here's a monopoly that quite literally can't even figure out how to act like one.
I work for a company acquired by Cisco (Score:1)
Me and all of my colleagues appear to have defected to startups that do essentially the same thing than the company they bought.
They just killed innovation and expected the company to focus on the low-end with all of the high-end being handled by Cisco itself in San Jose.
Not a good strategy to keep a company moving forward...