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Cisco Names Veteran Robbins To Succeed Chambers as CEO
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."
...to do one thing, and to do it well?
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
who wants to buy their routers now?
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 have to replace the entire thing with a similarly broken version of the exact same thing at great expense.
From my perspective most of these horribly broken products are a result of their acquire and crudely bolt together strategy. I maintain that if Cisco sold only one product that they would be out of business in a matter of weeks. Hoping some fresh blood does them some good... or does them in... Either way a win for the community.
After 16 months they put the sales manager in charge of an engineering company. This always works out well. Here come the layoffs.
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 and App's). Having a TAC you're able to call is THE primary reason Cisco is still on top.
H/W-wise, it seems like Cisco doesn't do nearly as much in-house, and has simply been in A&M for innovation although I may be wrong there.
I would like to see an 8-port or 12-port 10Gbase-T switch at a consistent and publicly advertised price.
Currently, only Netgear offers this. But it's been this way for years. Why has Cisco refused to end Netgear's monopoly?
If Cisco is looking for new market segments to enter in order to expand out of the there core market segment, might I recommend participating in the network switch market, as it's one they're clearly not participating in now.
"...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.
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...
"...has failed to make great headway outside its core networking business."
Maybe they should focus on the core networking business instead of all the stupid shit.
Oh. Hey. Cisco kid. Was a friend of mine. Until that beetles in the bog thing. Yeah.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.