Cisco’s problems
It looks like Cisco’s collaboration efforts with boards and councils will need to be restructured once more. John Chambers just acknowledged “we have disappointed our investors and we have confused our employees”. He seems to be now focused on operational excellence and may be planning to divest some of Cisco’s businesses.
I wonder how effective the council-and-boards strategy will be in determining which businesses will stay and, more dramatically, who should stay. It looks like some hard decisions will need to be made–those that cannot be done by collaborative VSEM. This will be a very interesting story to watch. I genuinely hope that Cisco will be able to find a coherent vision, but the 30+ moving engines diagram that John Chambers showed last year at Cal doesn’t seem scalable.
Sources:
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/message-from-john-chambers-where-cisco-is-taking-the-network/
http://blogs.forbes.com/ericsavitz/2011/04/07/cisco-what-should-they-sell/
As one of the first results of this realignment, Cisco will shut down its Flip business. In general, it looks like Cisco will focus again on the enterprise market and will not pursue opportunities in the consumer business. Hopefully, Cisco will be able to divest some of these businesses to companies that want to exploit the consumer market and can be Cisco’s partners in the future.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/cisco-to-shut-down-flip-video-business-will-give-pink-slips-to-550-employees/
Comment by Julián Limón Núñez — April 12, 2011 @ 4:23 pm