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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

reuters.com

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Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#21

Post by wsinks »

maratd wrote: post #16
femto wrote: post #10

> ...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

Ubiquiti is the shit. Really clean APs.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#22

Post by kkhire »

femto wrote: post #10

> ...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…

hardware way cheaper to do in china

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#23

Post by mdani »

femto wrote: post #10

> ...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 software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Facebook Open Compute) so the hardware spending has slowed down. (in tier 1 carrier I deal with, all new deployments must be on Openstack that uses whitelabel hardware purchased in bulk). EMC, Oracle, Cisco, HP are facing the impacts of such decisions.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#24

Post by mywittyname »

philip1209 wrote: post #6
arbuge wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Yup. For a few years at least until business see the TCO and realize that these services aren't cost-effective at scale.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#25

Post by insaneirish »

maratd wrote: post #16
femto wrote: post #10

> ...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

> They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc

These companies have nothing to do with the businesses that make Cisco its real money.

Growth in compute is from the cloud companies. They can purchase switches from ODMs like Edge-Core, Quanta, and Celestica directly. At the end of the day, because switching has largely converged on the same merchant silicon (Broadcom Trident/Tomahawk now, perhaps Barefoot Tofino in the future), they end up with a similar product at a lower price point. Either these companies are big enough that they have their own switch operating systems or they license one.

It's simply a different world than a few years ago.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#29

Post by jmspring »

arbuge wrote: post #3
philip1209 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about which business units this affects most. I expect it to affect hardware development as the company increases its focus on security.

Why would hardware development not be important to security?

I don't think commodity hardware will fully replace all business of places like Cisco. For one, Cisco does have large contracts like the Chinese Government -- they helped build the "great firewall".

I have no idea how this shakes out. But multiple companies in the traditional skew/license business are having to adjust (as others stated) to a different world.

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