New CEO at Cisco

Priston

Chuck Robbins will be Cisco's new CEO effective July 26

Cisco Names New CEO to Succeed John Chambers - WSJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umZBOyLt_UA

Any thoughts?

Iristheangel

This was super predictable. Most people thought he was going to announce something like this last year

nelson8403

I agree it was predictable but I'm not sure how good it is.. 17 years with Cisco with sales, while Juniper promotes a 17 year engineer to CEO.. I hope that Cisco can continue to rise. I've been seeing Juniper outperforming Cisco in R&S and Security, Cisco is still undeniably the lead in telephony though.

Iristheangel

Outperformed how? In the marketplace? Juniper lost money the last couple of quarters on security and switching as well as starting to sell off parts of their security products (NAC)? Juniper also got rid of their wireless and went in favor of a partnership with Aruba in the last year. I've seen too many Juniper switching disasters to call them superior in that space but I will say this: Their routers are great routers. That's the space where they're really strong in and I've seen some interesting things coming down the pipe with them in terms of SDN. Remains to be seen if it'll have widespread adoption but still pretty cool when you're looking through Rick Mur's Twitter or Networkworld.com. I think probably the strongest leaders in terms of DC switching are Arista and Cisco. They both have some pretty compelling products and widespread adoption.

I don't really have much to say about the new CEO at Cisco. It's probably going to be status quo for the most part. Chambers is still sticking around in some capacity.

nelson8403

Not outperformed profit wise, just usability wise. I used to swear by Cisco and their products but using Juniper switches they actually perform better in some situations especially packet forwarding. Cisco is good don't get me wrong but I feel that Juniper does outperform them. Telephony Cisco still can't be touched and I don't think that will change unless something drastic happens. I feel Aruba is definitely the best performer in wireless, Juniper seemed to be way behind and I think it was a smart move to just partner up with Aruba but I'm not sure how that affects their profits.

It may just be a new face and if Chambers is sticking around hopefully there won't be any drastic changes, I just hope Cisco still innovates in ways that wows us as users

and I see you're going for CCIE Data Center, how do you feel about Arista vs Cisco in datacenter?

Priston

I agree, since Chambers is sticking around, I get the feeling Robbins will be just a new face for the next year or two. I'm sure Chambers will become less involve over time though.

With wireless Cisco does have Meraki. I'm not sure who's best, but I'm interested in seeing what Cisco plans to do with Meraki.

Iristheangel

I've seen a lot of nightmares with Juniper switching... especially when someone tries to deploy QFabric but that's just my experience.


I think that Arista is a great low-priced, high performance, low-latency switch. I think for data center switching, they're great. They have a lot of the same features as the Nexus line: ISSU, vPC, VXLAN, etc that you expect to see from a DC switch. I think the Cisco competitor is probably the 9Ks in this space. Same Broadcom ASICs, super low cost and FCoE support at some point. A little extra buffer with the backended ALE ASICs is nice and some of the programmability that didn't really exist in the 7K/5K world. I'll probably know more in a month to be honest. I'm going to some free 9K programmability and ACI training so I'm hoping to wrap my head around it further

My CCIE DC gives me a lot of experience in the 7K/5K/2K world which has some unique features that differentiate them from their 9K counterparts and Arista but they're not always a fit for all people. Not everyone is going to be deploying OTV, FabricPath, FCoE, Unified Ports, etc - so paying the 7K/5K/2K price for these features doesn't always fit.