Burn, backlog, burn: Cisco inferno clears away supply chain hassles

Cisco has again increased revenue guidance thanks to an improving supply chain that's given the networking giant confidence it will sell more stuff in the second half of 2023. Like many hardware companies, Cisco struggled to get the parts it needs to make product during the plague years of 2020 and 2021, resulting in long …

[Anonymous Coward]

Collaboration Tools

Speaking to peers across the industry and looking at the market, Cisco are increasingly pricing themselves out of the collaboration tools market. Their on-premise CallManager is a very costly behemoth. Cisco are hoping people move from CallManager to their cloud Webex, but Teams and Zoom are eating away at that market segment.

Cisco's endpoints are also at the top-end of the price bracket and are struggling to compete against lower cost (and admittedly lower feature) devices.

[sanmigueelbeer]

Re: Collaboration Tools

Cisco are increasingly pricing themselves out of the collaboration tools market.

This is not just happening in the collaboration space. We are a Cisco shop for the last 23 years and we are about to embark on a "new journey" with Cisco's rival.

We are happy to pay premium Cisco prices if we can only see the benefits that comes along with higher prices. But we don't see anything in sight: TAC (R&S, wireless, security) is a complete joke with no end in sight and code is buggy AF.

And Cisco Smart License is, still, giving us grief because it causes a number of our R&S to crash due to memory leaks to the Smart (License) Agent process. It is one thing if your router &/or switch crashes due to a memory leak caused by one of router/switch operational process but it is another if your platform crashes because of, wait for it, Smart Licensing. That is one level of grotesque I do not want to be in.

[Anonymous Coward]

At a lower level Cisco's instance that you buy DNA advantage with the C9200/C9300 switches regardless of your need is just balmy. It's not cheap either and Juniper don't have such draconian policies. So 2022 was Hello Juniper year for us !

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind paying for hardware that does a good job but software licences across the board are rising faster than inflation and conditions are getting stricter. meaning you have to buy more licences. Cisco are no worse than others in this respect, and there are at least still some competitors. But we've already dumped them for access points and are actively looking alternatives for firewall/VPN, etc.

But Microsoft takes the biscuit and, in the absence of an acceptable replacement for Exchange, is probably only to get worse. :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the prices my R&S colleages are paying for Cisco kit and it is eyewatering. I really question whether they're getting value for money from it.