As an independent trusted advisor, Cisco is a hard sell in the collab space. They were the leaders and I made an honest living for about 15 years focusing on Cisco Voice/Collab. Since about 2018 it has been in decline. The rise of AWS Connect, Zoom, MS Teams, 8x8. RingCentral etc even companies that focused on SMB (after Cisco had no offering in that space when UC 300 and UC540 were ki---d off) such as 3CX have gained some traction in the market place. It is sad and I have found myself reinventing my skill set away from Cisco and Webex. I have to feed my family and increase my investments. It was good while it lasted but now I can honestly say, I am walking away from Cisco. It hurts as I was around when they bought Selsius. Oh well, we have to adapt to the market- the sooner the better. Never have blind faith in any vendor or technology. Move before the market moves you!
14 replies (most recent on top)
Buying Broadsoft was the worst decision ever. It set Cisco back by 5+ years at least. Cisco already had a born-in-the-cloud call control. It was Spark Call. For some inexplicable reason, the Steve-Jobs-wannabe, Rowan Trollope, completely ignored it during his tenure. He underplayed its value. He was enamoured by the messaging app and never understood the value telephony to collaboration. And all the telephony veterans around him were busy kissing his bu-t. No one had the ba--s to tell the emperor that he had no clothes. He built his brand on our backs, at our expense and soon left for greener pastures. But before the bozo left, he promoted an id--t, Tom Puerro, to lead Telephony. Tom was inherently clueless. A dunce. Tom's fame to glory was that he was a former navy seal. But he never displayed the traits of a navy seal.
Tom was the chief architect of the Broadsoft acquisition. His gift to Cisco was a 20 year old legacy Telephony solution. This genius along with his cohorts decided to gut Spark Call, a born-in-the-cloud solutio, for a 20 year old premise product. Post acquisition, suddenly, the original Cisco teams were reporting to BS management. They had carte-blanche. They called the shots. Our team of a few hundred was over run by 1500 BS personnel. They did everything to shut Call Mgr down. Never mind that it had a $1B run rate vs. $400m+ (at BS). It was a freaking mess. All the engineering resources from Spark Call were diverted for cloudification of BS products. After 5 years they are still cloudifying it while Teams and Zoom happily ate their lunch quarter after quarter.
Meanwhile, our navy seal bailed for greener pastures at Poly! The Steve-jobs-wannabe landed at Five9 along with his a-s kissing buddies. Sh-t floats. Watch out, it may come to a theater near you.
Collab was Cisco's to lose and they lost it.
Collab will die. Ip phones are like telegraph machines. Some conference rooms and a few people will need but the rest of workers can use cell phones or slack.
Ip voice is a commodity. Saying “your desk phone is like your cell phone” doesn’t work with millennials.
@xca+1ht6OdtK I have moved on to MS Teams and AWS Connect and everything cloud. I know Broadsoft are big here too but have not had the need to dig into it yet as my income streams are flowing from the others. I will jump wherever I can money from as I love all these technologies. The post came from the realization that my companies Cisco focus was well and truly over. The treatment of partners, complication of getting quotes, no account management for SMB lately, software bugs eroding any implementation profits, customers wanting non-Cisco. I will not bag Cisco as I was a proud Cisco partner and technologists and can honestly say- Cisco built the internet that the cloud is thriving on now.
Cisco has a reputation of being expensive and complicated, not always true though. The information flow and pricing into SMB/Select partners is not good. You are better off selling a competitor UC solution with better margin and cheaper overall price to customer.
Post from TheLayoff.com
No idea why they thought making another video phone
Can we pinpoint why Cisco loses in the smb to 8x8, ring, zoom phone etc? Is it …
- product/strategy/customer preference driven
- Competitive solutions are simpler
- Or are partners more profitable selling the competition
?
@ukv+1ht6OdtK actually it’s cloud call control too. Broudcloud is huge. Also, return to office seems to be accelerating but agreed handsets won’t be needed there.
Someone mentioned Cisco is 50% of the market. That may be true for legacy on-prem. For cloud registered phones, I don't think Cisco is even in the top 5. With work-from-home, PC softphone+video (e.g. Zoom/Teams) is the growth trend. Very few need hard phone handsets needed, just like few people need wired home phone service.
Another old timer here. It is amazing to watch the pace of change that's taking place right now, it's staggering. @qhn states correctly that CallManager has a large footprint and is still relevant, however that footprint has been shrinking and will continue to shrink.
Cisco CallManager is still in use in many large companies. Is Cisco IP phones in every bank I go to. Heck, even the Whitehouse has IP phones, 2 are on the President's desk in the Oval office.
CS Selsius - now that IS old school. Check this https://ptabdata.blob.core.windows.net/files/2016/IPR2016-01257/Exhibit-1142.pdf
Best of Luck :>
Similarly an older timer myself.
What have you moved on to? The industry doesn’t need many collab folks with the simpler products.
True and understandable