Cisco is burning money with mergers and Acquisitions. Cisco down from 34B cash to 4B
Acquired companies are no value take for example AppD, Scientific Atlanta, Flip and Tandberg. All Telepresence acquisitions melted money.
Why so many directors from different groups moved in M&A and saved their a-s-s ?
Why so many directors in M&A spared ? They have never been in M&A and no knowledge
What exactly going on ? Nepotism ? politics ? white collar Mafia ?
10 replies (most recent on top)
Not quite sure why you’re mentioning acquisitions from last decade, when there are a lot of more recent failures.
TAC hasn't been coming through like they once did.
Oh, I wonder why?
Cisco was once a leader in M&A as well as Innovation. Now M&A replaces Innovation at Cisco and we can't even do a M&A right anymore either. BroadSoft was mentioned, and it had so much potential at Cisco, and did well for a few years, now Calling is going nowhere. There is still some slow growth in Calling, but that is all internal migrations to cut budgets. All the original key leaders in Calling have moved on which is telling! Even the folks that did the original M&A and integration have moved on too.
One of the best acquisitions we ever did was BroadSoft. What went wrong is we lost many of the good people and now Cisco Calling is slowing going down the tubes as all the great Sales Engineers are gone and TAC hasn't been coming through like they once did either. Now that Microsoft sold off MetaSwitch, Cisco Calling is in trouble and Webex has been treading water and the Collaboration TAC is getting worse too.
When Cisco bought AppDynamics, the company was a leader (no. 1/no. 2) in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for application performance monitoring.
Unfortunately Cisco had no clue what to do with the company, nor did it know how to execute on any vision. The only thing Cisco did know what to do was continue milking the existing accounts without making the necessary investments required to keep a platform in the Gartner leaders quadrant. Sure enough the competition surpassed AppD and its customer base inevitably began shrinking. Today it’s a pathetic shell of its former self running on life support.
The common denominator between all these acquisitions is Cisco. When you can’t organically create anything, you buy companies, but since you can’t create, the companies you buy are doomed to fail in the long run.
Id--ts csco leadership
Too many incompetent people in high responsibility roles.
Run static analysis on any internal code base over the past 30 years. Many low and mid level people are incompetent as well. Some of them even became incompetent high level people over time. IT couldn't get the Cisco gear to work. Marketing was always saying the top 500 features were exactly the same priority and if not delivered in a week would cause the company to fail.
After all that we still buy some Cisco because for certain market segments as its competitors are even more sc--wed up. Let that sink in.
"So Liz is the only person in power at Cisco? John, Chuck, the board and the rest of the ELT over decades had no say?"
They all had something to say. I'm baffled at how clueless they all seem to be. Gillis last week said the most id--tic thing I ever heard: beat Palo Alto and you've got Arista. Err ... and how is that? We're doomed. Too many incompetent people in high responsibility roles.
Liz wasted billions on companies long gone.
So Liz is the only person in power at Cisco? John, Chuck, the board and the rest of the ELT over decades had no say? What about Cisco's internal "developments" like a giant brick sized tablet or an expensive personal telepresence system with a $60/mo QoS charge by your ISP when the world was moving from voice to texting?
Cisco is completely irrelevant to the CxO.
What's going on is just very ill-informed decisions. Liz wasted billions on companies long gone. No strategy, just buzzwords. It used to be big data, then kubernetes, then FSO and now it's AI. When you hear Gillis and G2 both talking nonsense in all hands, you start to understand why we're in such a dire situation.