ALL Pre- Sales Engineers and Architects are going to the pool of Agile TSA. Don’t let leaders like Eric Knipp and everyone associated with him fool you. This is about him saving money on the pre-sales by reducing head count, paying people less, all the while he uses this to get his next promotion. Our competition could not have asked for a better gift. Our AMs will no longer be able to go to their SA, as they will have to go to Click 2 Expert to get us. I can’t believe that engineering leadership is letting this happen. It is clear our SEDs are NOT fighting for us.
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MG quit because of this. He wouldn’t be a party to it.
The account team model is the bedrock of Cisco. If they removed the named SE for high-touch customers then said customers will walk from Cisco. They play with fire if they change the model. That said, it would not surprise me, nothing surprises me any more.
I’ve been looking at moving into an SE role from a CX consulting role. The way you’ve described it doesn’t make it sound appealing.
Be interested to know what you’d consider a good move that still stays technical and customer facing as an alternative to SE?
The SE role (or whatever they've renamed it to now – SA to copy AWS, I guess) at Cisco stopped being a desirable career path years ago. You end up either as an underpaid AM, or an overworked project manager, but certainly not the Systems Engineer that used to "own the room" and be the agent of change with a customer. I could not in good faith recommend someone starting their career go into the SE ranks at Cisco. There's just too much better opportunity out there.
Ge–z there’s some rubbish been posted here
This is the prefect example of one grain of truth getting blown up to “all/everyone”. All the Americas “TSA” roles will head down this path in the next 6 months, but their is “guardrails” on these per arch
Yearly revenue is up due to over paying for acquisitions. Paying $4 billion for $50 million in revenue is selling snake oil to Wall Street. GE ran out of acquisition money, and the revenue bubble eventually popped.
As Cisco has grown it has been forced to hire many SEs that are not technical or that are technical in non–RS domains. Combine this with the fact that for many years the company has pushed SEs to become mini–AMs. What they should do is fire all the AMs and make SEs the sellers. And take the actually technical SEs and make them TSAs.
This is all part of a multi year plan launched long ago by chuck to create a partner centric sales model. Chuck came from the Channels org. He doesn’t believe organic Cisco technical expertise is needed in order to make customers successful. Carnes’ role is to accelerate the dismantlement of what Chuck deems expensive overhead.
Agreed on the decline but yearly revenue is still in the top 3.
Why is anyone surprised? There's been little to no revenue growth for years. The cost of sales for products that are being commoditized are too high.
This is what happens when a tech company has sales people leading it for too long.
that's what Cisco Plus is all about – push out the expertise to Gold Partners. Ye know they had to actually cut expensive company IQ somewhere else next. Good luck folks... Been gone from Cisco for a year and life is better on the other side. Just prep yourself, takes a little while,
Project Voltron
How do you pool an Accoutnt SE the very notion doesn’t even make sense.
Why are the AVPs letting this happen. It is going to directly impact sales.
When? AMs aren’t good enough to fly solo like this.
When we go back to visiting customers, how is this going to work? The AM puts a DX80 on the customer conference table and says "say hi to my virtual engineer, who is going to answer all your questions"? If that's the plan there are clearly clowns running the show.
I have heard similar. Routing and Switching numbers are in decline. There are too many Pre-Sales SEs and SAs. They are going to a virtual pool. AMs will have to request an SA via the Click 2 Expert tool. It is already happening with Enterprise Networking and Data Center SAs. EVERY Pre-Sales technical engineer and architect is going to Click 2 Expert and then Agile TSA which is where you are pooled. It is happening in phases. Leadership will tell you that Click 2 Expert is only for metrics. The second phase is moving to Agile TSA which is a pool and this is for every pre-sales engineer and architect. Don’t let the leadership fool you cause the plans are already in progress to do this 2 phases for SEs and SAs. AMs are not going to be happy. It is shocking that AVPs and SEDs are not being transparent to the field.
Who told u this?