 | Staggered Nortel throws another punch at Cisco
You have to be impressed with the way Nortel keeps up the fight after filing for bankruptcy and shedding once strategic businesses. The staggered company this week threw another punch at Cisco and its other enterprise switching rivals with a new data center aggergator optimized for virtualized environments. Cisco replies to the blogosphere re UCS
Cisco's Wendy Mars, director of data centres and UCS, Europe, responds via YouTube to the blogosphere's inquiries on the Unified Computing System, the company's architecture-wrapped-around-a-blade-server. But be forewarned: the questions Cisco's picked from the blogroll make the eyes roll... How does she tough it out against the relentless grilling? And not a bead of sweat on the brow! That's composure... Does Huawei have the most potential to eat Cisco's lunch?
Earlier this week I had a conversation with an industry analyst about Cisco's strategy and it got me thinking about who has the most potential to eat Cisco's lunch. My conclusion? Huawei Why? Well, a couple of things, so lets go through my list: 1. Infonetics Research Optical Network Hardware Report: Huawei takes the lead in optical network hardware market in 1Q09 Preliminary results from Infonetics� Optical Network Hardware report show that Huawei increased its revenue market share to 23% for the first quarter of 2009, just ahead of Alcatel-Lucent, which maintains the overall lead on an annualized basis. "Since 2002, the optical network market has grown at a 8% compound annual growth rate, but for most vendors it looked more like 6% because Huawei absorbed a significant portion of the annualized gains. I don�t see this trend ending anytime soon, and if it doesn�t, Huawei could be the overall market leader for 2009," said Andrew Schmitt - Infonetics Research's directing analyst at for Optical. The report also shows worldwide optical network hardware sales dropped 22% sequentially in 1Q09, from $4.0 billion to $3.1 billion. 2. Cisco's Disjointed Management Structure and Strategy: It's my personal opinion that the late John Lennon balanced out his songwriting companion Paul McCartney's flaky songwriting tendencies and vice versa, much as I believe that former Cisco Chairman John Morgridge most likely balanced out Cisco CEO John Chambers and vice versa. Cisco's new management structure without Morgridge balancing out Chambers: For all its bravado about its new management structure detailed above, Cisco's financial results do not appear to be immune to the same ailments that trouble most businesses who simply have "ordinary" management structures. For example, during the first 9 months of its FY09, Cisco net sales plummeted $1.59 billion while simultaneously Cisco net income sank $985 million. Perhaps Cisco is no longer Cisco? But instead a wannabe Google or a wannabe Apple because it seems to me that Cisco believes the grass is greener or dare I say, way cooler in other yards! In my mind, Cisco could be drifting away from what made it successful because its M&A leader Ned Hooper also happens to be its consumer leader. May Giveaways
Cisco Subnet, Microsoft Subnet and Google Subnet are collectively giving away books on Google Apps Deciphered, the CCNA Security exam, an awesome SQL Server 2005/2008 training video and the grand prize, a Microsoft training course from New Horizons worth up to $2,500. Deadline for entries May 31. |
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