Hacker News Reader

Comment by network1 | Hacker News Reader

Does Cisco do anything innovative any more? Seems like a dinosaur that is trying to survive. Buying a bunch of acquisitions due to not being to innovate internally isn't a positive sign. Seems like they miss many market transitions. Probably explains their large yearly layoffs.

View on HN

Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line (albeit expensive). But yes you're right, other than their networking hardware they don't do all that much.

>Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line

It's really not though. The majority of their platforms are terribly under powered, and have very high costs per port.

Their only compelling platform at the moment, the NCS, uses a chipset made by a third party.

Are we talking datacenter or big company network or SMB gear?

I remember them having some impressive demos of Telepresence and something called Cisco Spark (which probably is an acquesisiton like you said). You join a meeting on your phone, just like Lync(Skype) but if you walk into a meetingroom with video conference equipment it transfers to that.

Cisco spark was a knee jerk reaction to Slack. It's a very poor knockoff (much worse than Microsoft teams).

You're probably right. I was mostly referring to the integration with the Teleprecence technology that you get if you have their super expensive video conference setup.

Cisco UCS is pretty neat https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-compu...

In a few years I expect people will just buy the kit directly from Huawei who makes it anyway, and be like, Cisco who?

Huawei is an OEM like cisco.

The ODMs that actually make most of the networking gear are Quanta, Accton, Celstica, Alpha Networks, and Delta Networks.

If you want to buy "white box" switches from those ODMs, you can do so through outfits like Edge-core, QCT, and others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com