Reply to post: Of course

Of course

Despite having a perfectly good cloud interface they acquired along with Meraki and their line of switches a literal decade ago, we have seen a chain of faceplants from switchzilla. In classic fashion, instead of building to the higher standard, the turned each of the warring internal product silos lose building their own incompatible tools, with no common platform or features, despite having broadly the same requirements.

As a result, some of my switches have a web UI, some don't. Some support other management tools, but no one tool can manage them all. Some of the tools need to be installed as a VM, some installed on the client machine, some may one day be in the cloud. Most of them don't fully support the underlying switch functions, which means that I spend a ton of time at the command lines still. This new cloud integration for the Nexus line is typical of the industry today. Like the setting panel in windows. Wait a decade, then deliver half the services and functionality in the new version, and spend years slowly porting the rest, then scrap the whole platform and start over before you even finish.

For what I pay annually into the Cisco tax, I have the right to expect more from them, but the company has succumbed to bitrot and it's own low expectations of itself. Our organization isn't doing anything particularly tough of clever. So like moving away from VMware, we are looking at competing bids from other vendors for our next core refresh and our phone system. Once that business goes it's not coming back.