Dave Barry, vice president at AlterPoint, in his blog, paints a pretty negative picture about Cisco, likening the company to a religion whose popularity is waning.
He says that Cisco did well to recruit and indoctrinate disciples, in the shape of CCIEs, but they are no longer commanding the hike in salary they once could. He also panned Cisco for offering its partners its “castaways” – qualified job candidates that Cisco can’t place at the company.
Barry says he sees three trends developing in the Cisco market:
1) Cisco is losing “members” because people don’t “believe” and are losing faith in exhange for reason…that Cisco is not the only path to networking nirvana. That they’ve topped out in terms of market share.
2) That Cisco’s products are becoming commoditized and there isn’t enough value for partners to pay competitive salaries to recruit smart people to install, manage and maintain Cisco equipment.
3) TCO is becoming a real issue and Cisco’s products really are increasingly difficult to manage and require far more headcount per device than they should. All the best jobs are at the “Vatican” in San Jose. The next best (read highest paying) are at the large enterprises and service providers who will pay up for technical talent because they have to make sure that the Cisco equipment stays up (and avoid problems like NTT in Japan just faced). . . And any talent that’s left is fought over by channel partners.
Has Barry correctly summed up Cisco’s lot?
