Yes and No Dave. (Full disclosure, I own a business that resells Cisco equipment and have worked on Cisco in the IT world for over 20 years )
Cisco has always had competitively priced products across the spectrum. You can buy a $300, $1000, $5000, $20,000, or $100,000 Cisco switch. They all have a purpose and individually are very competitively priced in the market. Where the perception of “Cisco is expensive” comes into play is when Cisco partners pitch the $20,000 solution when a $5000 solution will work just fine.
We primarily sell into mid market business and education space and we’re almost always the low bidder with Cisco going against all of the competitors out there.
Back to the article referenced, Cisco still owns the route/switch market, but similar to PC’s back in the 90’s compared to the 2000’s, a business simply doesn’t need to replace them every 3-5 years. They don’t need 10GB to the desktop and the 1G switches they bought 10 years ago are still working just fine.
Cisco is growing in the subscription and cloud based areas and the revenue from servers, datacenter, route/switch are all declining due to less churn on the gear.
I don’t know where the layoffs will occur, but I suspect they’ll be reductions in the legacy product areas due to the sales not being as high in that area.
Thanks for the feedback.
I’m out of the loop re business and what is needed.
As in most situations, creative people, not the ones trying to $crew their customers, can find often ways to stay in business if they take care of their customers.
It really depends if we start to see the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. A lot of the networking hardware out there still can’t handle IPv6, so Cisco still may have a market for network backbone and server farms that need to transition to IPv6 support.