Of all the tools in its ginormous account-control arsenal, Cisco holds solution “complexity” near and dear to its heart. Since its earliest days, Cisco has weaponized product complexity and applied it to pretty much everything from product design, to sales, and even to service and support. Examples…
Having clearly reached that “Get Off My Lawn!” stage of a 30+ year career in networking, over the next couple of months I’ve decided to share some unfiltered “insider” observations about how Cisco turned from its late 80’s IBM-killer roots, with its well-earned reputation as the liberator of…
In my last post, I introduced Pica8’s new IT Automation survey. I discussed how the survey shows that digital transformation is driving IT’s focus on automation, especially how they manage automating remote sites. They are clear about their desired goals, and IT automation efforts are well…
It’s clear that IT automation is happening at enterprises around the world. But there are lots of areas within IT. Which are organizations automating first, which are last, and what’s next on IT’s automation playbook? To find out, Pica8 commissioned ReRez Research of Dallas, Texas to survey 200…
Over thirty years ago – ouch — I joined Cisco as its very first marketing hire, tasked with giving them a more professional image than “Stanford grad students run amok” in preparation for their IPO. But during my six-year posting, I also got to witness Cisco’s first attempt to build an actual…
Automation is increasingly required to keep up with growing access network requirements, which are forcing organizations to add new switches and/or replace older switches with higher-capacity models at an accelerated rate. With precious few experienced network engineers and technicians in-house,…
Operators of state and local government networks; K-12 networks; and higher education networks have long had to lean heavily on automation tools to deploy, configure, and manage their campus and access switching infrastructure due to the combination of multiple remote sites paired with lean IT…
