Musings from Cisco LiveMusings from Cisco Live

Cisco bolsters customer relationships and strengthens its position in servers and software. Looking ahead, network management and vision should be the next focus.

Cisco Live 2012 is now in the books and I thought it was a much different event than other Cisco Live/Networkers events that I had been to in the past and I thought I would share my thoughts on the event.

My biggest takeaway from the event was the improved relationship between Cisco and its customers. Post-restructuring, Cisco made a commitment to listening to its channel and customers better. The message from the resellers at Partner Summit in April was that indeed Cisco was listening to its partner base better. The feedback from Cisco Live was similar, with almost every customer I managed to interview saying that they felt their voice was being heard and Cisco was easier to work with today than a year ago. Much of this credit goes to COO Gary Moore, who was tasked with cleaning up a lot of the back-end systems problems that created long lead times, POs falling through the cracks and other issues that frustrated Cisco's resellers and customer base.

Another major takeaway for me was the incredible momentum and rise of Cisco's UCS server product. When Cisco got into servers I, like many, was skeptical. Why did the world need another server vendor? Cisco has done an outstanding job with the product and many customers feel it's flat out the best server on the market for virtual environments.

There was an analyst roundtable with a couple of Cisco UCS customers who explained why they chose it and how they were using it. You could look at this with a critical eye since these were hand-picked Cisco customers, but the thing that impressed me was the fact that both the customers described themselves as "server guys" with not much of a network background. I think it's fair to say that Cisco is now a bona fide server vendor with a product that's as good as or superior to the incumbents, depending on the workload. The other remarkable thing about the rise of UCS is that it's pulling through network sales. That's right, servers are pulling through network switches, not the other way around. Who would have thought?

I also think that this was the first event where I feel Cisco finally has the product right to start to walk the walk of being a software company. For all Cisco's bluster and talk over the past five years, I never really felt they had their software strategy quite right. But if you look at the One PK announcement, combined with the shift to Jabber, the continued growth of WebEx, and other initiatives, I think it's fair to say the product is in place to let Cisco be a real software company.

However, while the product is in place, Cisco still needs to get Cisco Developer Network (CDN) going to create the incremental value to its customer base. CDN has really floundered over the past few years but there appears to be a renewed commitment to it. The company needs to execute on CDN and be patient and let it mature. There's no silver bullet answer here, just continued execution.

Another takeaway from the event is that there is a definite opportunity for Cisco or someone to step up and provide a single pane of glass to manage virtual data centers and cloud infrastructure. Many customers have told me that the legacy management tools such as HP OpenView, Computer Associates and IBM Tivoli are well past their prime and a better solution is needed. There are many, many companies that can address part of the problem (BMC, NetScout, Xangati, Gigamon, Opnet, VSS, Riverbed, etc), but no one that does it all. VMWare's VCenter does a great job of managing from the hypervisor up, but someone needs to address the segment from the server down through the network. I think this is something Cisco could do and be successful at, but they would need to go and make some acquisitions, maybe even a couple of big ones.

I also noticed a much more competitively aggressive Cisco at this year's event. Typically Cisco doesn't do a lot of competitor chatter but Chambers made it clear that they are focused back on the core and they're picking share back up in the network. He specifically called out the 7% share gain in routing, which has come primarily at the expense of Juniper. Some people haven't liked this change but I think it's high time Cisco stops letting other vendors dictate the terms of competition. Expect Cisco to keep punching, with Juniper, HP and Huawei being the primary targets.

While I didn't get as much vision from the show as I normally do, I heard a lot more in the areas of practical execution, which seems much improved since Gary Moore stepped into the COO role. The company seems much better positioned today and with some of its competition such as Juniper and HP fumbling around, we may see Cisco break away from the pack.