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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."
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 matter what the contract actually says.
Juniper is guilty of alot of the same sins as Cisco. Calling TAC for support isn't what it used to be. Calling JTAC, sometimes I think I'm talking to the same guys.
Once you get used to the quirks of each individual platform, however, their kit is still pretty damned good, especially considering the traffic we put through them. For the past 18 months, my job has pretty much been solely migrating, site by site, off of our aging 7609 platforms onto a mixture of Cisco ASR9k's with the 9000v Satellite boxes, or Juniper MX's (sometimes a T series if the site is big enough) backed up by EX switches.
I much prefer working with the Cisco kit to the Juniper kit. It is, in my opinion, alot more stable and reliable than the relevant Juniper gear. While I used to have to RMA 7609 linecards all the time, ASR linecard RMA's are pretty infrequent, while Juniper linecards (as well as EX switches) are much more frequent.