Cisco delusion over Enterprise / software revenue continues....
It's getting desperate at Cisco. The shift away from SP to a solely Enterprise-like business (just look at who mostly got LR'd recently), for DC, Cloud and all that comes along with that.
Chuck is without a doubt a terrible choice for Cisco at this moment. A disconnected individual, surrounding himself with some of the most out of touch people you can imagine. He even seems to revel in providing material to prove this, for example recently announcing internally that Cisco needs to refocus on IETF and legacy standards bodies. Clearly he seems not to have noticed that OpenSource and open hardware has moved the world on and 2-4 years for a standard from IETF is a model of the past...
The refocus on Enterprise comes just at the time when OTT cloud services, AWS, Microsoft etc, are about transform Enterprise exactly as has already happened to OTT services for residential.
What foothold does Cisco have in OTT today? Pretty much zero.
There was always an internal giggle when Cisco would announce they where 'Number 1 in Cloud' at ra--ra all-hands events. At the same time the CPSs, AWS, Google, FB, MS etc, had already stopped buying ToR switches and servers from any major vendor and where designing and outsourcing the build for whitebox replacements, ordering these units in the millions.
The trend continues down to optical, bye bye Cisco proprietary, and hello grey optics at 80% cost reduction. Not only are the CSPs designing them and publishing the specs, but they can purchase them cheaper than Cisco can, since it's all about volume.
So what is Cisco's answer? Well it appears to be the same as Marconi and others ghosts have done. Focus back on previous revenue streams and try to milk them a little more. do a bunch of increasingly desperate LRs to shore up the revenue margins so as not to get hammer in the market on stock pricing.
Of course they make a lot of noise about new business and re-focus this that... but essentially it's emperors new clothes time.
Thing is, very dog has it's day, and Cisco has likely had it's time run out of 'woof'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
