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."

Comments

Maybe it's a sign...

[TWX]

...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.

Re:Maybe it's a sign...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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 squeeze between bare-metal switches at the bottom end of the market and bespoke in-house hardware designs for the huge data centres at the likes of Facebook. So far, despite a couple of significant commercial moves, I see little evidence that Cisco has a long-term strategy to take advantage of, or even defend against, any of these trends.

Re:Maybe it's a sign...

[TheGratefulNet]

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'.

Re:Maybe it's a sign...

[LaurenCates]

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.)

This always works out well...

[robbiedo]

After 16 months they put the sales manager in charge of an engineering company. This always works out well. Here come the layoffs.

Re:Dear Cisco, please die already.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.