Tag: Cisco

Cloud rains profits

Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operators and vendors’ revenue jumped 21 per cent to $544 billion in 2022.

New data from Synergy Research Group claims that the biggest growth was seen in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

Annual revenue from these services grew 29 per cent to reach more than $195 billion, despite some headwinds from the strengthening US dollar and problems in the Chinese market.

In the other main segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $229 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 19 per cent from 2021.

Synergy said public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 13 per cent from the previous year.

Vendor job kill continues

Never mind any skills gap, Vendors are firing staff who they may never see again to make a short-term cut in costs.

Google handed six per cent of its global workforce pink slips apparently to refocus on its priorities, including AI.

CEO Sundar Pichai said: “We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.”

Pichai said the company will be reviewing its current operations in order to make the most of its early investments in AI.

Global cybersecurity market grows

The global cybersecurity market grew 15.9 percent during the third quarter of 2022 despite the economy being rubbish.

Research from channel analyst Canalys found the industry earned $17.8 billion with Palo Alto Networks was the number one vendor in the quarter. The vendor grew by 24.9 percent year on year and increased its market share to 8.4 percent, up from 7.8 percent in Q3 2021.

Cisco closely followed with growth of 16.7 percent and a flat market share of 6.9 percent.

Fortinet placed third, climbing 29.9 percent to reach a 6.7 percent market share, up from six percent a year ago. 

Cisco lets staff go despite record profits

Cisco posted its largest quarterly revenue total in the company’s history during its first fiscal quarter of 2023, but still managed to lay off staff.

Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said the tech giant saw an easing of supply chain constraints and component shortages during Q1 2023. This shift allowed Cisco to deliver hardware, which has released software subscriptions that “were sitting in backlog,” the company’s CEO said during the company’s first quarter 2023 earnings call.

But despite a positive start to the fiscal year, Robbins took to the earnings call to confirm plans to fire staff including members of Cisco’s Collaboration segment. Employees will be notified on Thursday of the coming job cuts, Robbins said.

Cisco’s Pasalic launches Lifecycle Advantage programme

Cisco has launched its Lifecycle Advantage programme claiming that it provides the tools to help partners deliver higher levels of customer experience.

Cisco director of digital experience, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Zarina Pasalic said that digital was growing in dominance as users change their researching and buying patterns.

“Digital is the experience our customers are having with us. That experience means everything in a subscription world, so if the experience is the product that we’re all going to be selling, we have no choice but to unify around that endeavour”, she said.

The pandemic accelerated these trends and placed “a lot more focus and energy and urgency on digital transformation, and the need to deliver digital-first services.”

She thinks that the last two years have dramatically changed the way customers engage with brands. The lines between B2C [business-to-consumer] and B2B [business-to-business] have become blurred.

“Customers, as well as partners, in B2B expect the same experience that you and I are having in B2C, and they want to communicate in digital-first channels that they prefer. They want speed and they crave empathy.”.

Cisco’s enhanced Lifecycle Advantage to make sure it is responding to partner feedback and providing the tools that are required.

“We’ve got to make things easy for [partners] by providing that end-to-end experience. That is their path to value. It’s tied to their business outcomes”, said Pasalic.

“We really allow our partners to digitally engage with their customers to drive adoption through the lifecycle to upsell and cross-sell opportunities, based on data and analytics, and, of course, to secure renewals. Globally, we have got well over 7,000 partners in the programme, and more people are finally recognising just how innovative and valuable it is.”

 

Cisco shows off lighter-weight specialisations

Cisco has been showing off a new pack of “lighter-weight specialisations” designed to match customers’ changing buying habits.

The networking king claims the new products will enhance partners’ ability to deliver more comprehensive solutions and help its channel to battle the ongoing backlog of business.

Cisco said that it began rolling out the new solution specialisations in September and noted that cross-architectural solutions were in high demand, particularly among cross architects.

BT expands global e-waste programme

BT has expanded its global e-waste programme for business customers by teaming up with networking giant Cisco to offer a new circular economy service.

Companies upgrading their network and IT infrastructure to support new multi-cloud deployments will be provided with a takeback service that will see BT environmental specialists map their sustainability requirements.

Replaced or decommissioned electronic equipment from a customer’s network will be shipped back to Cisco to be responsibility reused or recycled through its takeback and reuse programme. Up to 99.9% of what is returned will be reused or recycled, BT said.

Cisco sees supply chain constrains ease

Cisco thinks its supply chain constraints are easing and should get better over the next few months.

The industry has been plagued with component shortages for  18 months and the channel has been managing inventories and customer expectations.

At the time Cisco thought that the situation would improve by the second half of the year. Cisco’s announcement of Q4 and fiscal year numbers, for the period ending 30 July confirmed the trend.

Grey market is booming warns Cisco

Cisco has warned that supply chain challenges and material shortages were creating a rise in grey-market activity and counterfeit IT products.

Cisco legal director Al Palladin said some customers — and even channel partners — were looking outside of Cisco’s authorised channels to get their hands on new products faster, resulting in a spike of counterfeit activity,

Products sourced outside of Cisco’s authorised channels won’t come with a valid warranty or license from Cisco. This gear also runs the risk of being tampered with in a way to makes it more vulnerable to security breaches. Not only could this cause damage to Cisco’s brand, it also could leave businesses open to attack or early failure of the product, Palladin warned.

Cisco’s Global Partner Organisation takes over small business segment

Cisco Systems’ Global Partner Organization has assumed responsibility for the company’s small-business customer segment.

Cisco’s vice president of global distribution sales Andrew Sage said the reorganisation combines the small-business customer responsibility with Cisco’s largest route to market, the Global Partner Organisation.

Cisco’s small-business customer segment is a 100 percent partner business, especially as these customers gravitate toward managed services and Everything as a Service, Sage said.

Ukraine war will have a knock on effect here

Economic sanctions against Tsar Putin will have a significant impact on the IT channel, according to analysts at Context.

According to a report cross-border payments are extremely challenging if not impossible for channel players and their customers now that major banks are locked out of the SWIFT system. The EU and US have banned the supply of hi-tech goods including semiconductors, computers, telecoms and information security equipment. Russian aircraft are banned from European airspace, and Boeing/Airbus have stopped servicing the Russian aviation industry, which will further restrict transport flows.

Steel takes over Splunk

Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele is leaving security outfit to take over as Splunk’s new CEO.

Steele was the founding CEO of Proofpoint and has overseen the company’s growth from a startup to a publicly-traded security-as-a-service provider.

He will take over as permanent CEO on 11 April following Doug Merritt’s decision to step down in November last year, just five months after Splunk received a billion dollars of private equity funding from Silver Lake Investment.

“Splunk has built one of the most respected brands in tech and is at the forefront of security and observability. I’m honoured to join the company at such an important moment – for both Splunk and the industry. I’ve dedicated my career to helping companies around the world safeguard their data, systems and infrastructure, and know first-hand how critical Splunk’s products and solutions have become to customers as they navigate hybrid, multi-cloud environments with increasingly complex attacks and threat actors.”

Cisco puts ThousandEyes into the channel

Cisco is converting its ThousandEyes arm into a channel proposition.

Cisco channel leader Oliver Tuszik said it had got to a point where the company wanted to put the network visualisation tools into the hands of its partners so they could react to growing demand from customers for greater visibility and improved security.

He said: “We are helping our partners further deliver on their commitment to customers by announcing that Cisco ThousandEyes is moving to a full channel sales model.”

“I am thrilled about this and the work our teams are doing to support partners’ needs in adding this capability to their Cisco portfolio. Delivered as a SaaS [software-as-a-service] solution, ThousandEyes is another important Cisco component in driving more subscription-based annual recurring revenues – an important shift we know is just good business for our partners’ bottom line.”

Cisco wants Splunk

Networking giant Cisco is trying to buy the data analytics software company Splunk.

Cisco has made an offer worth more than $20 billion for the outfit recently although neither side is in active talks over a deal.

If it goes through the deal would mark Cisco’s biggest ever acquisition – smashing the $6.9 billion acquisition of Scientific Atlanta in 2005.

Splunk, which is currently searching for a new chief executive after Doug Merritt stepped down from the role in November, sells a platform that monitors and searches and visualises machine data.

The two companies already have a partnership, and Cisco has continued to put its efforts into moving towards software in recent years, with CEO Chuck Robbins praising partners in November for helping the company’s shift toward software and services.

 

Whitty exits Cisco to join rivals

Former Cisco UK&I channel boss Angela Whitty has left the networking giant to head Crawley-based IT solutions provider Ampito Group.

Whitty said taking the CEO role at Ampito was a “compelling opportunity” after 29 years at Cisco, the last seven of which were spent as MD of UK&I partner sales.

She said that it intrigued her to see how the other half lived after being part of the vendor space for so long.