In less than 24 hours I will be boarding a plane headed to San Diego. It’s my first year to attend Cisco Live and I’m hopeful I’ll see something different than what I’ve seen from Cisco over the past few years.

That companies are migrating so quickly to op-ex, cloud services models seems to have surprised Cisco – they have been fumbling for a good while now, trying to find their way in the new world.

The Meraki acquisition was smart – it gave Cisco a robust-but-easy-to-deploy, low-overhead infrastructure solution that customers have been clamoring for, but from the outside it appears the legacy product teams are at odds with the Meraki team. The promise of a converged feature-set appears to have stalled out, with internal politics and concerns of sales cannibalization serving as roadblocks.

Last year, Cisco Intercloud was pitched to me as the solution to all my cloud integration problems. Intercloud was going to enable me to easily migrate VMs between cloud providers and extend the LAN across the multi-cloud WAN. Problem is, as a brand new product Intercloud is designed around a paradigm that’s rapidly fading.

Modern IT is not being built around individual VMs or extensible network segments, it’s all about workload. Being able to move VMs around is handy for the near-term in dealing with legacy applications, but workload containerization negates one of the biggest selling points of Intercloud. I don’t want to move VMs from AWS to Azure or On-Prem to Cloud, I want to kick off a Docker push of my app image and let the platform take care of the rest.

Intercloud seems to be targeted at where the puck was, and the game has shifted considerably. It will be very useful for many big businesses, but not for very long.

Even in the datacenter, startup SDN solution providers like Cumulus Networks seem to be getting better at the Cisco stuff faster than Cisco is getting better at rapid innovation.

I say all these things not to beat up on Cisco, but to nudge them towards where I think they should go, where I think they can remain relevant. Right now, Cisco seems to be focused on providing solutions for today, when other IT vendors are pulling their customers into the future.

The Cisco I hope to see at Cisco Live is one that is aware of where it is falling behind and is rapidly moving to correct. I want to hear more about DMVPN than OSPF & BGP. I want to hear more about APIs than integration licenses.

I don’t think Cisco is at any risk of going away (Existing enterprises and telecoms are going to continue rolling out Cisco equipment because that’s what they do by default.), but like any big tech company they are at continual risk of becoming irrelevant and technologically boring – and right now their ship seems to be changing course very slowly.

Photo credit: Andrew Hart