Giving Cisco a makeover

Cisco could use some help with video, org charts and network management systems

Cisco and Microsoft are two of the most powerful companies in the IT industry and it seems everyone has strong opinions about them. We've assembled several of our top bloggers from Network World's Cisco Subnet community and asked them what they would change if they could give Cisco a makeover. (See related story, Giving Microsoft a makeover).

Jim Duffy

You can't point to any one problem Cisco needs to address, but there are several areas where it can improve.

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Cisco and Microsoft are two of the most powerful companies in the IT industry and it seems everyone has strong opinions about them. We've assembled several of our top bloggers from Network World's Cisco Subnet community and asked them what they would change if they could give Cisco a makeover. (See related story, Giving Microsoft a makeover).

Video, optical and theft, oh my!

Jim Duffy

You can't point to any one problem Cisco needs to address, but there are several areas where it can improve.

First up is expanding its videoconferencing/TelePresence reach into mid-level and desktop markets. The company understands its current TelePresence tools are too expensive and elaborate for that market and just bought market leader Tandberg to rectify the problem. Now the trick will be to integrate the offerings where reasonable to create a product line that will enable an enterprise to support video everywhere from the boardroom to that small remote branch office.

Speaking of support, Cisco's optical business could use some... or is it on life support? Cisco finally shuttered the old Petaluma, Calif., headquarters of Cerent, the optical company it acquired for $6.9 billion in 1999. Though the facility was mothballed for years, the closure is a fitting symbol of Cisco's fortunes in the optical business for the past several years: The Cerent product only garnered a 3.7% share of the 2009 third quarter $1.4 billion worldwide market for multiservice SONET/SDH platforms, according to Dell'Oro Group. That makes Cisco 10th – yes, 10th – in market share, hardly the No. 1 or No. 2 it shoots for when it enters a new market, and in terms of revenue certainly well shy of the $1 billion yardstick by which Cisco typically measures acquisition success.

And let's note that Cerent was the biggest Cisco buy at that time, matched only by the Scientific-Atlanta purchase of 2005. Yet sales of the Cerent product – Cisco's ONS 15454 SONET/SDH multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP) – and other optical systems have been in decline for several years. A $1 billion-plus business in the early part of the decade, the ONS 15454 generated less than $300 million in revenue in 2008, according to Dell'Oro Group. Cisco should cut and run.

Another challenging market for Cisco is WAN optimization. Year in and year out, Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) tools are outshined in this market by Riverbed and BlueCoat. In fact, in Gartner's influential Magic Quadrant Cisco is considered a "challenger" compared with BlueCoat and Riverbed (and there were even reports circulating that Cisco was reluctant to install WAAS in its own network). It's time for Cisco to get serious about WAN optimization, by either making over its current tools or acquiring a leading supplier.

Lastly, this is not so much a product issue but a policing issue: Cisco needs to reign in the fraud that pervades its SMARTNet product service, maintenance and support program. Every quarter there seems to be another reseller ensnared in a scheme to defraud Cisco of millions of dollars by ordering replacement parts for switches and routers and then reselling them.