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Quitting My CCIE Status. Time to Move On.

By Filed Under: CCIE 38 Comments

Its been 17 years since I achieved CCIE status. Its time to admit that CCIE skills are not a part of my future and its time to let it go.

Where Am I

I have two roles today. First as the Co-Founder/Chief something of a startup. Packet Pushers as a business IS NOT about aiming, launching towards your goal and pushing hard,  its more like guiding a very large falling and accelerating rock so it doesn’t hit the edges as it accelerates and gains momentum. It takes a lot of time and energy to do this.

My second and more visible role is podcast host, analyst and writer on networking at Packet Pushers.

The price of CCIE recertification is substantial. I’m guessing a minimum of 200 hours and more likely 400 hours to get back into the books, work through my flash cards and start memorising a bunch of pointless information. The value ten person-weeks of my time is very high.

Is CCIE relevant to Me ?

Hyper-convergence means legacy networking is pretty much over in the etnerprise data centre. SD-WAN means that deep knowledge of legacy protocols isnt’ needed anymore. The SDN platform hides most of the details there and moves your career into proactive design and strategy instead of having good memory and understand on technology details. Hybrid cloud / multi-cloud is the hotness for the next few years. Having lived through Novell Netware, Window NT before getting into networking where i lived through WAN and Data centre security. I did some WiFi and a lot of monitoring before that became pointless.

The only place where active CCIE status matters is resellers. The idea of working for a vendor reseller has little appeal and often do not pay well. Cisco doesn’t seem to care about my loyalty as they offer no benefits or advantages to maintaining my CCIE relationship. And, broadly, end users don’t have much concern about status now as the ability to communicate and be adaptable is equally important as your technical chops.

I’ve talked a lot about cloud and hyperconvergence, and I don’t see any of the CCIE certifications being useful.

Letting Go

I can re-learn what I need. The foundations of the last decade are still there and educational material is widely available. Its very different now from 2001 when training resources & labs were extremely limited.

If I was planning to invest hundreds of hours in training I would be focussed on a career choice that is one step ahead of the market. Right now, I would invest time in a public cloud – AWS/Google/Azure, doesn’t matter which one. Having ‘cloud skills’ would be more valuable than relearning old knowledge that won’t 1) be used in a few years 2) have less commercial value i.e. no extra salary.

My Ego

My ego doesn’t need my status anymore. I’ve proven to myself that I’m good enough and I don’t need anyone else to validate me. In the middle stage of my career with only ten to fifteen more years (if I’m lucky) of working, I can make this choice.

Farewall CCIE program, time to invest in new skills and leave the old behind.

Musing: FTC Accepts Proposed Consent Order in Broadcom $5.9 Billion Acquisition of Brocade

By Filed Under: Cisco, Musing

  1. Fibrechannel competition is reduced to two suppliers, Cisco & Brocade.
  2. The merged Broadcom/Avago is silicon-first company that manufactures and designs ASICs as a core business
  3. I believe that Cisco outsources some part of its silicon design to third parties.
  4. Cisco outsources the manufacturing of silicon to third parties including Broadcom.
  5. Cisco now buys fibre channel silicon from its only competitor.

Brocade and Cisco are the only two competitors in the worldwide market for fibre channel switches, and Broadcom supplies both companies with ASICs to make fibre channel switches. The complaint alleges that Broadcom’s acquisition of Brocade could harm worldwide competition in the fibre channel switch market because as Cisco’s supplier, Broadcom has extensive access to Cisco’s competitively sensitive confidential information.

Probably because no one actually cares about Fibrechannel I guess. Margins are good, customers are suckers and its time to make stupid money from stupid customers.

FTC Accepts Proposed Consent Order in Broadcom Limited’s $5.9 Billion Acquisition of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. | Federal Trade Commission : https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/07/ftc-accepts-proposed-consent-order-broadcom-limiteds-59-billion

Cisco’s Has a New CEO as John Chambers stays on.

By Filed Under: Blog, Cisco

Some quick musings on John Chambers finally stepping down as CEO of Cisco.

  1. Chambers is still Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board. He isn’t going far and not much will really change in the next 12 months.
  2. A personal thanks for making my unbelievable career possible.
  3. A change at the top of Cisco seen as long overdue by most industry watchers.
  4. The EMCworld conference is happening in Las Vegas. Cue your own speculation on that. Remember that the global Cisco Partner conference was last week.
  5. Chuck Robbins wasn’t the front-runner. Rob Lloyd and Gary Moore were previously tipped and suggests that something has changed inside the Cisco boardroom.
  6. Chuck Robbins was running sales and operations – you could speculate that the board wants to focus on defending and continuing the current sales position and improving internal efficiency. Moore/Lloyd were positioned as leading the “next generation” of technologies that Cisco that have moved slower than expected.

Cisco press release has some “Why Robbins ?” points:

He most recently served as Cisco’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, leading the company’s global sales and partner team that drives $47B in business for the company. He has helped lead and execute many of the company’s investments and strategy shifts, including building the industry’s most powerful partner program, now worth more than $40B in revenue to the company each year. He was also a key architect of the company’s strategy for the commercial business segment, which grew 8% year-over-year last quarter, and now represents 25% of Cisco’s total business

You could put almost any sort of speculation into this space as to why the previous front-runners weren’t selected. I would take a guess as follows:

  1. The BUs that Chuck runs appear to have been stellar performers.
  2. Cisco cares a LOT about sales in the current market as it is under attack from all sides.
  3. Sales in the Data Centre haven’t been that great compared to overall growth in the segment. UCS has done very well but remains small, ACI has a had slow start. Importantly, VMware’s NSX has been growing much faster.  Customers are slow to adopt SDN in the data centre.
  4.  Meraki has been a huge success for Cisco, growing from $150MM to $500MM and is based on subscriber model. Robbins seems to have had a big hand in this.
  5. It could be that the board wants to focus on operations and sales during a time of change. Whitebox products in Ethernet, optical and routing could disrupt Cisco’s market position.

This article at Bloomberg has the following quote that bodes badly for employees suggesting that further headcount reductions and cost cutting will happen soon:

“Being the mathematician with a focus on numbers, we’re going to drive a level of operational rigor that maybe even is a little tougher than what you did, John,” the incoming CEO said.

Executive Departures

The Cisco executive ranks have been competing for the CEO position for several years and rumours abound of a dog fight to gain status and rank have been swirling around. Now that a candidate has been selected, most people expect that the exodus of long-term staff from Cisco will happen to senior executive ranks as they cash out or head to more interesting jobs in startups or competitors. This could create serious disruption internally as the balance of power between the internal fiefdoms/BUs shifts.

This competition has been both positive and negative for customers in terms of products and sales. Its possible or even likely that Cisco will go through serious disruption if large numbers of executives leave.

Something to watch for in the months ahead.

The EtherealMind View

This long overdue transition is a small start to adapting to a changing market. John Chambers isn’t leaving or going very far so its hard to see that much will change in the next year or so. The incoming CEO is strong on sales and operations which suggests that Cisco will continue to push hard to sell what is has today, continuing the fast follower strategy and avoiding innovation.

Ultimately, I believe that Cisco has limited control over the future as the data networking market goes through convulsive post-scarcity transition to a commoditized market. It faces unprecedented competition in nearly every market segment in which it operates such as Optical, SP edge, data centre, enterprise WAN and some markets are sunsetting such as Unified Comms, Videoconferencing and Cable Video.

Appointing a CEO who specialises in sales and process seems more like rent extraction from the existing business than a herald of real change at the company. And thats probably the best choice for shareholders in the short-term. Good luck and best wishes to the new CEO, Chuck Robbins.

Cue your own comments. Would be interested to hear what you think ?

References

Cisco Systems, Inc. – Cisco Board Names Chuck Robbins as Next CEO

Cisco taps veteran Robbins to replace Chambers as CEO | Network World

Is the Cisco Nexus 9000 is a Whitebrand strategy ?

By Filed Under: Blog, Cisco, Design

I was reviewing the non-ACI Nexus 9000 products this week and began considering that this is Cisco’s cisco-nx9000-whitebrandresponse to the disruptive impact of whitebox on switching sales.

Takeaways

  • Cisco Nexus 9000 now looks like whitebrand switch product following changes in the market.
  • The relatively low-cost of the product is attractive to Cisco’s loyal customers.
  • Market share by revenue is high but market share by ports or devices is changing.

Nexus 9000 (Non-ACI) Is Whitebrand/Britebox

There are three parts to a whitebrand or britebox Ethernet switch today.

  1. Whitebox Ethernet switch hardware
  2. branded operating system
  3. branded vendor support for software and hardware.

For most vendors, the whitebox Ethernet hardware comes from well known manufacturers based in China such as Quanta and Accton. The same companies who produce most networking hardware for Cisco, Juniper, Brocade etc.

Whitebox ethernet switch combinations

Nexus 9000 as Whitebox

The Nexus 9000 internal hardware is commodity merchant silicon. From what I can determine, the x86 processors, FPGA, memory, power supplies, fans etc are commodity components that are widely available on the open market. Broadcom StrataXGS/Trident switching silicon is used to rapidly bring the product to market in months instead of the usual five years for silicon build.

The ACI versions of the Nexus 9000 are not whitebrand product although they get benefits of commodity components, shared marketing and volume purchasing.


 whitebox-product-service-mix-20150421

 

(this graphic was updated at 20150421-1936 to correct some errors, my apologies to those impacted)

Operating System

The NX-OS is a Linux distribution. Cisco made a number of design choices to remove most or all Linux functions to make it appealing to Enterprise customers. Compared to Cumulus, BroadcomOS or PicoOS, NXOS represents a different design direction.

Hardware & Software Support

In my peer group there is consensus that Cisco’s Technical Assistance Centre (TAC) service & quality has been going downhill for some time but Cisco’s own customer satisfaction surveys remain high. There is no question that Cisco offers high quality but costly service capability on both hardware & software globally.

Pricing

The Nexus 9000 is cheaper than other Cisco switch products by a substantial amount and appears to replace a substantial amount of Nexus 7000/6000/5000 sales in the data centre market. I read this a sign of demand for a low-cost, simpler Cisco Ethernet switch product rather than feature improvement or acceptance of the ACI SDN platform.

Conflation or Compression

Some time back, I considered merchant silicon and whitebox products as separate issues. Over the last six months, my perception is changing:

  1. It has become clear that any Ethernet switch is mostly merchant silicon and commodity elements even if the switching chip is proprietary.
  2. My perception of the value of proprietary switch silicon is now low. Merchant silicon is coming that has flexible pipelines, dynamic protocol support and better performance from multiple suppliers.
  3. The operating system has become the focal point for features, functions and capabilities. That is, network features like MLAG, BGP/MPLS and orchestration features like Puppet, Chef & Ansible.

The outcomes of this perception shift are:

  1. Silicon will be critical in product selection and features in the same way that x86 CPU selection was important five years ago (but not today). It matters, but not that much. 
  2. operating system selection will be driven be features you are using in your network ie. STP, TRILL, MPLS, MLAG etc.
  3. operating system selection will be driven by the SDN platform in play i.e. Ansible, ACI, NSX, Nuage Networks, Big Switch all drive different operating system choices that subsequently drive hardware choices.

Cisco Whitebox

Cisco doesn’t need to embrace whitebox and its likely to be anathema the leadership team who have high levels of self belief in their “branding and value”

Cisco’s size means they manufacture more products than whitebox. But the market is shifting. The recent Delloro suggested that 7% of sales by revenue was whitebox in 2014. If you agree than Whitebox is one quarter the price, then this would suggest that whitebox volume would greater than 25% of ports or units shipped LAST YEAR.

Note:

The Cisco ACI SDN platform works best when using versions of the Nexus 9000 that has custom silicon to support extended features. These products would not fit the whitebrand model, are highly proprietary and restricted. They shouldn’t be confused with the discussion here.

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