I have a few old colleagues that are(were?) working on IaaS powered by OpenStack stuff at Cisco. I can only assume they were working on this. I hope they get to move onto other projects :-(
(My employer would hire such folks too, but you'd have to be willing to move to Germany).
Amazon is heavy with their advertising and this have a huge mindshare with potential customers and even non-customers alike. No amount of extraordinary exec play would have changed that in favor of Cisco.
Cisco was dedicating $1 Billion to the project, AWS made $2.5 billion in Q1 2016. Think of that for a second
Actually - Amazon is now an established brand name even in the corporate/enterprise execs' minds, but Cisco used to be way more famous and trusted than Amazon until recently. They've never been the cheapest or first to market, but their stuff works well enough and their support is good, esp. if you have the patience to first go through the mostly useless level 1 and 2.