Resignations at Cisco hint at internal power struggle
I&#x27;m a bit biased here since I work doing development mostly aimed at a competitor of Cisco in the Unified Communications space, but after seeing a few presentations by Rowan Trollope at Enterprise Connect, I have the feeling all is not well at Cisco and this article seems to echo that.<p>At EC, I really felt like they were on the defense trying to market a product that&#x27;s trying to be &quot;cool like Slack&quot; while chiding enterprise customers for being uncool and wanting things like control over upgrade roll-outs and being interested in &quot;fake clouds&quot;[1].  Their presentation of this new product had the feeling of an angry old man trying to sell mood rings to hipsters.<p>The attitude of the presenters bordered on insulting and I was reminded of a meeting with Cisco guys with a very similar attitude, almost decade ago, when my previous employer was trying to re-instate maintenance on our Cisco phone infrastructure.  At the time, we were looking to either get maintenance or replace it with something else (Office Communications Server 2008 -- which hadn&#x27;t been released yet, but which Microsoft was actively courting us to become a tester of with very good financial terms associated).  The rep sarcastically said &quot;What are you going to do, switch to Asterisk or LCS?&quot;[2].<p>My recollection of parts of this is hazy, but IIRC, they weren&#x27;t willing to budge on price and even found places that we had miscalculated the cost we already couldn&#x27;t pay, resulting in a <i>higher</i> cost.  In 15 years of dealing with vendor reps, I&#x27;ve never had a call that even came close to that one.  I fielded two different calls within an hour of that meeting&#x27;s end with <i>both</i> people saying the Cisco guys were &quot;arrogant DICKS&quot;.<p>Within two years my previous employer ripped out all of our Cisco IP-PBX related devices, moved to OCS 2007 and the company has stayed with the Microsoft Solution of Various Names since.  If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn&#x27;t believe there would ever <i>be</i> competition for their product, and had a <i>very</i> dim view of Microsoft (still seem to, today).  Their new product (who&#x27;s name escapes me) seems to be the direction they want to go, but they&#x27;re late, and aren&#x27;t as good as the competition.<p>[1] This was a phrase the Cisco folks seemed really attached to and I kept thinking that the one feature you want in a collaboration&#x2F;&quot;phone&quot; system is stability.  And the &quot;fake clouds&quot; were things like on-prem&#x2F;cloud deployment options available from Microsoft and policies that embraced limited backward compatibility and controlled update roll-out.  For me, the phrase became &quot;fake clouds don&#x27;t rain&quot; (or at least when they do, you have some control over it).<p>[2] This is paraphrased, but not much. Microsoft had courted us at the time and we were involved in pre-release for OCS.  We didn&#x27;t actually migrate to LCS, we migrated to OCS while participating in the OCS R2 TAP.  They provided us with people on-site that basically designed and helped us roll the solution out at no charge (they were supposed to be resources for the TAP program but they assisted with everything).