I think hardware will take a hit for sure. Cisco will consolidate development around software defined networking hardware and then charge a yearly subscription fee to use its network OS.
Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
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Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#12Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#13I'm curious about which business units this affects most. I expect it to affect hardware development as the company increases its focus on security.
Curious, security always seems to be first one to go.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#14I'm curious about which business units this affects most. I expect it to affect hardware development as the company increases its focus on security.
Curious, security always seems to be first one to go.
In the past, i would agree. There seems to be a push into by the military industrial complex into "Cyber Warfare", so i think Cisco is angling for some Government contracts.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#15Is this from government pressure? Probably some underground stuff going on...
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#16> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
> With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware?
There's a ton of smaller players ready to jump in. They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would hardware development not be important to security?
Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-term bet.
That's a logical pivot; I'm slightly surprised they didn't try beefing up their extended support or doing a soft rollout first. Did they lay any groundwork or expectations for migrating their platform?
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#18Is this from government pressure? Probably some underground stuff going on...
I don't follow. What government pressures companies to lay people off?
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#19> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware.
Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. So a company could buy 50 white box switches and slap IOS or JUNOS on them.
In the networking world OSs are even more religious then the Microsoft Linux debates of the past. I know networking shops that will never buy anything but Cisco because they only know how to network on Cisco and they refuse to learn anything else. That is the market that Cisco is going to target.
Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees
#20> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to…
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