Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I agree with a few others here. Biri is 100% dead weight. His cloud strategy isn't a strategy at all. It seems like something he picked out of the trash at HP. He is simply carrying on the tradition of bad CTOs at Cisco.

Biri is an idiot, he won't last long, just like his other roles at other companies, I give him 3 years tops. He is far from visionary.

Cisco's cloud strategy announced 3 years ago and revised quarterly is a hail mary hoping its largest customers will buy off on "hybrid" and continue to purchase gear. Most new SaaS ventures and old rusty companies like Unisys are launching in AWS. MIcrosoft has an AWS alliance to complement its own offerings as well. There will be a white box solution for the edge. Proprietary voice and video will also decline. Fitting the last comment was about Kodak. When the music stops, and it will, there won't be a chair left.

Padma and Pankaj are not really tech guys...Padma ruined everything in Motorola and landed at Cisco....Talking of ELT....

All ELT members have a sugar daddy...Take a look at a girl called Borno....she is running a quarterly strategy review with all BEs...can u believe this? absolutely ridiculous...Somebody who does not have basic understanding of business tells the CFO (she is the biggest dumb) and idiots in corporate strategy how to think about revenue....Such roles are basically to satisfy diversity in ELT...but it adds another layer of bureaucracy....she takes numbers from all groups, changes a bit here and there and shows to Chuck where "she" think the company will be in 3 years time...and the CFO/CEO buy it...She is the eyes and ears for Chucky...

Chuck is a Chambers clone, sales guy with no understanding of technology, which is the last thing Cisco needs now

It's not just the ELT many of the senior management are so divorced from what is actually going on at the ground level. Strategy changes (if you can call them that) all the time with no real movement forwards.The only successful strategy has been 'headcount reductions' !!!!!!

1yai: fully agree. But you need to know we have been on a journey regarding our cloud strategy ...... and continue to be on a journey with unknown destination. Execs are paid well to "sell" a new cloud strategy every 6 months. Its ridiculous. Doubt that Biri will change this. At least he is a great DJ ...

Pfft Biri is a waste of space - booted out of HP CLoud for failing to execute, now we have him! He'll talk about hybrid for 2 years then leave - like other executes

What about Fran?

Isn't she brilliant? The whole People Deal idea isn't just genius? And the we-want-millenials-others-may-f....-themselves strategy?

Chuck is evil, only cares about his compensation and giant ego. He's turned Cisco employees into paranoid freaks with quarterly layoffs and openly seeking to replace the people who built the company with 14 year olds.

The rest of the ELT are horrific and clueless (except Rowan & David). People deal, my a--. Go away Fran and take your lies with you. Your voice gives me a seizure.

All of the ELT need makeovers of their personalities & physical appearance. These are a very ugly group of people.

Karen CMO is running a sh---show. How can she let a totally s--ist sh-- VP of SP Marketing target all the senior level women on his team for LR?? That VP & his posse of married "family men" bullies who harass others should be castrated. Meanwhile the VP of ENT Marketing flies first class every 2 weeks from Israel to SJC, has a company paid apartment & driver YET she fires people just so she can use company funds for her ghoolish make-up and 1980s bad perm.

I beg to differ. Cisco is a company driven by successful sales, not technologies. Satya Nadela may also be a bad example. Cisco just had Pankaj (CDO) and Padma (CTO). They brought with them no technical visions but nepotism and favoritism. The inability to execute and poor product quality have no impact on the overall business and revenue. The disastrous collapse of Cisco that many in this forum hope to see will not happen.

Dr doom, msging is a small portion of spark services

I have little faith that Chuck is the guy to drive the kind of turnaround Cisco needs in order to compete long term, but time will tell. HR is in desperate need of new leadership. And to build on your comment about Chris and the sales team, engineering should not be building products that sales can't sell (unless they're just really bad sales reps, in which case, they should be replaced too). That's a big missing piece to the current mess, an effective product management team driving portfolio investment decisions. There should always be an R&D arm of the engineering team focused on developing technologies that might be years away from being productized, but the rest of engineering should be working to an MRD developed by a strong product management team and based on market opportunity. Just throwing over the wall any crap product engineering dreams up or copies from a competitor is not a winning business model.

What they should do is form a bunch of executive councils.

I believe Rowan's downfall will be SPARK. Not sure why he was allowed to gouge rouge pumping millions into this. There is a large SLACK user base in engineering that has not switched to SPARK and never will. It is the exact same product used by millions for FREE worldwide. I have only heard of Cisco employees using SPARK...no out$ide users.

How SPARK and Jabber fit together and why...nobody seems to know.

Before I would rate any of the ELT, I need to understand what is Cisco's vision for the future and how is going to create a valuable competitive position in the markets in which it compete's. Has Cisco reached its Kodak moment where we will be reading its epitaph in 5 years or are their great things ahead for Cisco.