It's probably dispiriting to Cisco's marketing department to have two major product announcements in 3 weeks greeted with the sound of shoulders creaking as the tech community collectively shrugged. The new additions to the Nexus line apparently have been garnering the same lack of enthusiasm. The major complaint seems to be that there's nothing new here, that this announcement pursues the same strategy that Cisco has in the past: throw bandwidth at it. Back on March 9th,Cisco claimed that the CRS-3 was 'designed to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet and set the pace for the astonishing growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services through this decade and beyond.' For such a portentious claim, you'd have thought they'd be coming in gold instead of slate blue.
That was followed by the Borderless Networks presentation, an all-star lineup of Cisco Senior Staff that might as well have been hosted by Caspar Milquetoast for all the interest it generated. The other new announcements, product refreshes, etc. have all been greeted with the same complaints again and again from comments boards – 'No innovation', 'late to the table', etc.
I'm all for more bandwidth, of course. But it can't continue to be the solution when we appear to need better security, management, and cost containment of the bandwidth we already have. Cisco also seems to be bucking against the business cycle. We've seen what could be termed modest growth in the economy, but nothing near what I'd estimate is necessary for the big corporations that Cisco seems to be targeting to get them off the dime and spending their IT/networking budgets again. That may have to wait for a more robust recovery to occur, but in the meantime, what new area of networking should Cisco focus on to spark real interest in corporate data center consolidation and growth?