According to The Red Herring (March 1997), Routing the Competition (pp.82–88), John Chambers, Cisco’s long-time CEO, argued that it was “the ability to scrap something and move on that separates companies like Cisco and Microsoft from the rest of the pack. He said, ‘The companies that get in trouble are those that fall in love with religious technologies. The key to success is having a culture with the discipline to accept change and not fight the religious wars.’”
John, of course, was referring to the importance of emerging packet technologies that he hoped would overtake the established circuit-based infrastructure prevalent in the 1990s. He was the leading change agent of his time and challenged established industry giants Nortel and Lucent.
Today, John may believe he still needs to accept change, but his company is not acting like it does. Whenever Cisco missed a market transition and came to the party late, the company usually made big acquisitions such as acquiring Stratacom for $4 billion to get into the WAN switching game and picking up Cerent for $6.9 billion to enter the optical transport field.
Today, instead of partnering or acquiring what it needs, Cisco has resorted to lawsuits, recently targeting Arista Networks and its cloud-based portfolio. Does this mean Cisco no longer accepts change – this time the transition from hardware-based product offerings to software-defined networking (SDN) solutions? Is Cisco fighting change by trying to stop others from innovating in telecom? Has Cisco become the Nortel Networks dinosaur of the 2010s?
One thing Cisco has yet to learn is that lawyers may delay innovation (and cost you a lot of money) but they never halt its advance. All that came be said is, “Come on, Cisco, get your head out of the fog and into the cloud game.”
Today, John may believe he still needs to accept change, but his company is not acting like it does. Whenever Cisco missed a market transition and came to the party late, the company usually made big acquisitions such as acquiring Stratacom for $4 billion to get into the WAN switching game and picking up Cerent for $6.9 billion to enter the optical transport field.
Today, instead of partnering or acquiring what it needs, Cisco has resorted to lawsuits, recently targeting Arista Networks and its cloud-based portfolio. Does this mean Cisco no longer accepts change – this time the transition from hardware-based product offerings to software-defined networking (SDN) solutions? Is Cisco fighting change by trying to stop others from innovating in telecom? Has Cisco become the Nortel Networks dinosaur of the 2010s?
One thing Cisco has yet to learn is that lawyers may delay innovation (and cost you a lot of money) but they never halt its advance. All that came be said is, “Come on, Cisco, get your head out of the fog and into the cloud game.”