Other cloud companies are poaching Cisco talent (Cisco did make good products to enable the cloud) and using that talent for building the cloud (ORCL/AWS/GOOG etc) . Given that we provide a ton of infra for the cloud, why isnt Cisco developing a damn good cloud? We can even utilize those learnings and invest it back to our products that we make. Sure, this has been thought thro before. Cisco also has a ton of cash that it can invest. Or is Cisco looking to buy than build ground up?
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“Years ago, there actually were several formal "offers" that were going to be potentially Cisco "cloud". This was 2015 era“
It was earlier that a poor decision was made. When Project California was announced to SAP & Accenture Circa 2008/09 they told Dc leadership to build out a hosted solution and follow what Amazon were doing; as that is what their customers [at that time] are tracking and not investing in major SAP replatforming projects until they have figured what this ‘cloud’ thing is. The S in MPLS shut the SAP CTO down and said don’t be ridiculous no one is moving enterprise workloads outside of their own data centres…. Ever.
Cisco poured billions (yes, billions) into Project Nimbus circa 2010-2012 if memory serves. The project eventually died because of three problems: (1) inexperienced leadership that had never built anything (2) wrong technology choice with Openstack (3) political battles about project ownership between CX and IT.
"Years ago, there actually were several formal "offers" that were going to be potentially Cisco "cloud". This was 2015 era. They were scrapped. Many opinions as to why, but just too many cooks spoiling the stew. The train has left the station. Too late to cook now."
Yup....they were scrapped because Cisco LR'd most of the teams involved.....and then tried to buy one of the competitors (which didn't have a good product), and that failed also. Yes, the train had left the station at that time also....but there could have been some interesting products with partnerships......but again, the key teams and knowledge was LR'd. Unfortunately many of the cooks (ie execs that can't cook) remained. Same ole story time and time again.
Cisco is a sales & marketing company, we can't build new products internally. Our version of product management is to acquire new features from startups.
Why oh why?
Because MPLS was a HUGE FAILURE.
MPLS was a time wasted garbage dump.
MPLS was a money pit and Waste.
MPLS stole Cloud from Cisco.
MPLS was THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES.
Not getting into cloud will prove to be one of Cisco’s smarter decisions. We were never going to be able to compete with AWS or MSFT in that market.
As someone else said, the cloud market is becoming a commodity and many of my customers are questioning the value compared with the cost.
(Incidentally, there are some really good internal stories of Cisco using a cloud provider to provide SaaS and having to ki-l the offer because of the recurring cloud costs - Ki**ic.)
Those same customers are now starting to at move some workloads back into in-house DCs and looking to Cisco for the networking.
Equally, the white-label-equipment threat never got to unmanageable proportions.
Where Cisco perhaps did make a mistake was not backing a single horse but taking the multi cloud stance. I’m not seeing any customers using that scenario at any scale. Sure some of them might to dev-test in different clouds but production tends to be in one cloud. And that is the only real hope for AWS and MSFT, vendor lock-in and the cost/risk of change.
We could have become the network provider of choice for one of them but someone didn’t like the margins being offered.
It would destroy the company. In reality there are just two credible cloud vendors and that's Azure and AWS. Oracle is a hopeless attempt at stopping database customers from migrating to Azure and AWS. Google isn't able to breakthrough and is outpaced by the two leaders day by day. Imagine Cisco in this picture, with its politics, inability to execute rapidly, no prior knowledge in building and operating massive scale systems. Do you remember what happened to VMware when they tried? AWS nuked them in a week with a generous price slashing. It's too late, we can all blame Chambers for that.
https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1373639
There is some Cisco in there but not as much as you might think.
There’s a lot more than you think.
Because cloud is obviously close to becoming a commodity.
Years ago, there actually were several formal "offers" that were going to be potentially Cisco "cloud". This was 2015 era. They were scrapped. Many opinions as to why, but just too many cooks spoiling the stew. The train has left the station. Too late to cook now.
That is not Cisco's core business. Cisco's core business is on-prem hardware and software.
Anyway, not sure that Cisco do provide a ton of infra to build the cloud. The big cloud companies largely build their own stuff on proprietary white box and Linux. There is some Cisco in there but not as much as you might think.
Too many fiefdoms. Growth by acquisition has a lot of underdeveloped products stitched together. Leaders from one acquisition plays favoritism with bad products.
Need some unified Cisco technical leadership actually driving towards something rather than a bunch of individual floudering ships.