back to article Cisco COO: 'I actually thank God that we had a crisis'...

Cisco's chief operations chappie has a heart of gold: Gary Moore has thanked the big man upstairs - not his boss - for the economic meltdown that forced it to send thousands of workers to the scrap heap. In summer 2011, the networking giant was getting sweaty under the collar about dragging its costs more in line with revenues …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Hud Dunlap
    Mushroom

    I notice he didn't loose his job

    How does he think the company got in bad shape in the first place?

    1. Chris Miller

      Re: I notice he didn't lose his job

      He needs to open the first envelope.

  2. John Sanders
    Facepalm

    Cisco got it all wrong...

    What they need to make sales pick up is to create the cisco "Jordan" switch range

    http://www.jondube.com/resume/msnbc/palmjordan.htm

    There company saved.

  3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Holmes

    We "had" a crisis?

    Newflash: It's going strong, transforming the world into a Hollandaise. Literally.

    And currently it is GOING STRONGER. Lots of stuff is redlining for a grand finale now.

    I wonder whether the even will be CISCO after the next one?

  4. Crazy Operations Guy

    I think they still need to make some cuts

    Such as why they have both the Catalyst and Nexus lines of switches, they're both data-center grade and compete in the same space. Its seems to fairly common with Cisco that multiple product lines will do the same thing but be slightly different in some small way.

    What I'd like to see is everything move to be blade-centric. Where you can take a switch blade from a high-end many-blade chassis, slide it into a 1u chassis and make an access switch. Or get a 2-blade chassis, a router blade and a 24-port switch blade. Bam, now you have all the networking you need for a branch office in a small, convenient package. Or a company outgrows a switch, simply just move the blades into a bigger chassis and now they have more capacity and only had to buy a new chassis.

    Having a common form factor for all products would radically decrease development time and manufacturing costs. It would allow them to get customers hooked early and give them a well-defined and easy upgrade path.

    1. AskOllie.com

      Re: I think they still need to make some cuts

      "...get a 2-blade chassis, a router blade and a 24-port switch blade." Cisco are years ahead of you. They have this now: get a Integrated Services Router, with 24 port PoE switch blade. And firewall. And IP PBX. And voicemail. And WAN acceleration. And a mini-server-on-a-blade.

      1. Crazy Operations Guy

        Re: I think they still need to make some cuts

        Yeah, but what happens when your office grows and need more of one of those features? You are going to have to shell out quite a bit of cash to get a bigger device for all that, or a separate appliance and increase the cost of managing it all. This is where a lot of customers decide to ditch Cisco and go with ShoreTel, Palo Alto Networks, or whatever company is offering better prices; and why there is a pile of Cisco gear in my customers' offices.

        While those routers offer good features and good performance on the inside, the WAN side is too slow to use at any of their locations, they've been growing rapidly and need more WAN bandwidth than the Cisco ISRs they have can offer. This is why I proposed the idea of a blade form factor for everything, the routers could have been kept in place and Cisco would have one more happy, loyal customer. Rather than buy all new equipment (And replace it all again in a year due to projected growth, spending even more), they went with HP's networking gear who were offering discounts steep enough that they could replace the HP kit every year for the next 5 years for the price of one replacement cycle with Cisco (HP offered such a steep discount due to the customer getting all their laptops, desktop, servers, printers, etc. through them)

  5. Unicornpiss
    Thumb Down

    I'm sure...

    All the laid-off workers are grateful for his piety and humbleness...

  6. JaitcH
    FAIL

    Happy to help ... even more

    Since CISCO is a de facto NSA cooperator in the spy business, I am doing my little bit by NOT buying CISCO products.

    Hope it helps.

  7. asdf

    wow

    Proving once again how full the executive ranks are with sociopaths.

  8. TheVoiceofReason

    To be fair to Cisco the crisis has been a humbling process for them. They have lost a lot of their arrogance towards their customers and partners. Sadly it looks like the people running the show have still got a lot to learn. All the major vendors are suffering from institutionalised insanity. The 90s and noughties left them in a deluded state. They want to continue to behave like the divas of the business world despite their saggy bottoms and bingo wings. Time the for idiots driving these train wrecks to have a reality check.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      No they haven't. Cisco engineers, SEs and sales twits are all over Twitter spewing forth overwhelming quantities of contempt and arrogance for all and sundry. Cisco has a hell of a lot more housecleaning to do before they're a humble, customer-focused company.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like