Has anyone heard of layoffs in Advance Services? Rumor is, AS is not profitable
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AS is a pain in the a-- ... The fact is, customers moving to cloud simply don't need all those services to stand up new infrastructure any more. So add mega trends to the list of things killing Cisco, along with extreme political correctness, nepotism, inability to execute, lack of accountability anon anon... Remember, Cisco hired HRC as a keynote speaker at GSX FY15. Symbolic of their serious disfunction
I agree - the whole "Service Delivery Executive" thing is a joke. These guys then think they are sales, and marginalize those in the sales teams who are actually out trying to meet the customer's needs. They have no skin in the game (no quota), so they make commitments to customers they can't keep, and then just waltz away. The whole structure sets sales and delivery up as adversaries - when they should be a team.
The unholy nexus between AS, GSQS and GIS was under scrutiny for quite sometime.
Sales treats AS as an afterthought, as one poster said, simply because it is incredibly overpriced and designed primarily for Fortune 100 size companies. Partners often provide similar services for half the cost.... Granted the partners do not have the access to the BU's / special code / etc. which is required for remediation work...but that's not what the AS role was intended to be in the first place.
Sales will sell what gets them to goal, and they have found spending time on AS proposals is a waste of effort 80% of the time.
Rumor is, AS is not profitable
AS has never really been that profitable. It does make money - somehow - after cleaning up the **** from an over aggressive sales force, and almost non existent QA from engineering. AS are the unsung hero's of Cisco.
I heard they are after grade 11 & 12 ... Many of them are kind of doing grade 8 or grade 10 work.
Many AS Datacenter is one large pot of nepotism
There is no more AS DC - clearly you're out of touch. SC's org now covered anything that's not security or a thing.
don't invest in the future and promote lack luster mgrs to directors
Challenge is, BP has no clue what he wants AS to be. He says he wants AS to be more like a consulting business, then drives 10+ reports to a manager. Sorry buddy - consulting orgs have lots more layers of managers, all of who are billable. Most AS managers spend 50hrs a week in meetings, failing miserably to talk to customers. BP, sort it out.
they added roles like "Service Delivery Executive" and made people directors that should have been managers, while keeping "service delivery managers" to do the actual managing.
Don't get me started on the "SIA". Too many Directors in that org. who couldn't manage a project, let alone govern a portfolio of $xM programs. Empire building in full force, and BP asleep at the wheel.
I used to work in AS before voluntarily leaving Cisco. Our AS team used to help with alot of reactive type work, even if that was supposed to be more of a HTTS role. We provided a lot of value for the customer that way and they generally trusted us.
Now on the customer side, I can honestly say the AS team we work with isn't bad, but there's just not enough "procative/design/best practices" work to keep those guys busy. As a result, our management significantly reduced the AS contract when the last renewal came up. Unless it's some cutting edge technology where a customer might need hand-holding, I don't think AS can provide a lot of value proactively, especially when new designs are usually coming through the technical sales guys. Also, they added roles like "Service Delivery Executive" and made people directors that should have been managers, while keeping "service delivery managers" to do the actual managing. Add a PM or two and a HTOM on top of that, and that's pretty bloated team that doesn't any of the actual technical work.
AS has always been an afterthought to sales. Sell the box, then sell smartnet. The last 5minutes of the meeting the Services Sales guy stands up and says, "one more thing" as people walk out the room.
AS Datacenter is one large pot of nepotism. Grind away on $20k deals, don't invest in the future and promote lack luster mgrs to directors. How much more PDI can you sell?
Due to the disrupting changes in the market, no one will eventually be signing up the expensive service contracts with AS. Probably bare minimum TS contracts will be the futures. ISP routing, DC switching, Enterprise R/S & Collaboration revenue declining as customers across the globe are in search for cheaper hardware/software. Cisco's expensive products or contracts will be die down eventually. If not now, next year by this time it is not unreasonable to expect layoff in AS too.
I heard they are after grade 11 & 12 such as Solution Architects & Team Leaders. Many of them are kind of doing grade 8 or grade 10 work. So no wonder if their jobs gets eliminated.
There were quite a few layoffs in AS back in March. I've yet to hear of any this time though.