DS2

Sigh.

Always appreciate a good rant.

In this case, it also helps make my point. I did not say the Catalyst is a monolithic box that has been unchanged in 10 years. It has evolved over the years in, as you point out, an number of incremental steps, and sometimes the upgrades were not an inconsequential effort. And we have learned from that and come up with things like ISSU on the 6500 and a whole host of features on the N7K.

My point, however, is that the change is driven at the customer’s pace because they want or need new features need additional capacity, not because we got bored and EOL a chassis and decide to not support it and pour our investment into our cool new platform. The Catalyst gives customers granular control to only apply upgrades where they need–they can keep a consistent operations and management environment without having to forgo the ability to incorporate new technologies as needed, where they are needed. For example, f you need to deploy a chassis full of 10GbE is it properly simpler to buy a new chassis already loaded? Probably, but I don’t find most customer deploy a new technology that way. They will take a new technology and deploy it incrementally and sparingly where it is cost-effective or functionally required, then then shift buying patterns as the new technology becomes mainstream. For the rest of the network gear, if its doing what the business needs it to do, leave it alone and let it get dusty.

As for the postscript, a good number of our customers buy their support through channel partners, self-spare and the like, so I don’t think we are “raking in” all that you think we are. But again, it helps make the point. Customers can continue to feel comfortable with their investment because of continued support (heck, we just stopped supporting Catalyst 5xxx hardware last year–12 years after we introduced them and 5 years after we stopped selling them). The lack of hardware churn means that customers can invest in their own spares to save money. The lack of platform churn also means they are not constantly wasting time dong test and qual on new systems. The operations and management consistency means that customers don’t have to keep sending folks off to get retrained and the network folks themselves have highly marketable skills.

Finally, I do agree with you Greg, that, ultimately, we want the engineers happy with the product and we continue to focus on that through both engineering and TAC. But, I am also guessing, somewhere up the line, whomever is paying the bills is also fairly pleased that we worry about investment protection too.

Have a good weekend,

Omar
Cisco Systems