Thanks for your candid comment. I really do appreciate when readers of our blogs take the time to give us feedback, good or otherwise. Let me explain some of the intents of my blogs, and provide my thoughts on some of your feedback.

(1) “Pushing Cisco NOS Services”

In general, I write my blogs to help readers understand how we in Cisco Services can help them get their projects done quicker, and to pass on key lessons I learn from our work with customers that I hope many will find helpful, interesting and hopefully sometimes controversial. Across the industry, many blogs are only about the product or technology – I aim to help readers understand the broader set of challenges – including how can you get the technology adopted faster into your data center, how can you do this when you are so busy already, and what kinds of issues may you encounter on your journey.

In this blog (honest!), I didn’t set out to make it a sales pitch for Cisco NOS. I aimed this primarily at customers who already have Cisco Network Optimization Service aka NOS – or in this case, not so much Cisco NOS, but more precisely the Cisco Data Center Optimization Service. I hope this blog helps them think about how to exploit such services even more.

I also wrote this blog to highlight new capabilities. We have a wide range of services capabilities in these services, and sometimes we make additions. So this article was about our Cloud optimization components as you know. What you may not know though is that we’ve not really communicated much externally about our Cloud optimization components to date, and how customers – who already have NOS or Data Center Optimization Service – can make use of them. So I set out to to help these customers get more from what they do pay for our services – which I would hope you agree is a good thing.

I was, I agree, pretty overt in say something like (summarising here) “if you don’t have a NOS contract, you should get one.” Yes maybe too strong for a blog. The reason I’m so enthusiastic about our Optimization services, is because of the benefits I see customers achieving with these services. And how these services are very complementary to our partners’ services offerings. One of my colleagues here in Europe – through a Data Center Optimization Design Review – helped a customer eliminate part of their design – and cut out the need for some of the hardware, saving the customer $500,000 of CapEx. As another example, I experienced first hand how customers benefit from Cisco Services such as NOS in a major service provider customer I was working (when I was in a different part of Cisco). Over the lifetime of the project, I saw this customer literally leapfrog their major competitor in technical capability of their network, turning around a late-to-market situation into competitive advantage. It was the expertise of the Cisco Services team that helped this customer design, absorb and operationalise the new products and technologies into their network in less than 2 years – whereas the competitor had been developing their network for 3 or 4 years before this customer even got started. and in fact this experience helped me decide to change jobs from the Cisco R&D organization into Cisco Services. So I hope you can forgive my enthusiasm here.

(2) “Cisco Tax”

In Cisco, we don’t aim to produce “good enough” products. Our aim is to deliver superior value. Value that – for example – when we help you design a network, can be expanded incrementally as new requirements come in, as opposed to having to do a substantial re-resign. Value that reduces total cost of ownership (e.g. see http://blogs.cisco.com/smallbusiness/the-right-network-can-lower-your-total-cost-of-ownership/, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns1015/white_paper_c11-687149.pdf). Value that – as my personal example above shows – delivers competitive advantage for our customers. I’d argue, therefore, that our competitors are the ones who tax – by not delivering on total cost of ownership, and by http://www.overpromisesunderdelivers.net/

(3) Pushing “more Cisco *products*”.

Our Advanced Services consultants are rewarded on customer satisfaction. While they may recommend certain Cisco products as part of a design, our technical consultants don’t earn direct commission on Cisco products sold as part of their designs: they make these recommendations to increase overall customer satisfaction and value.

Thanks again for your candid feedback. I hope my reply helps clarify the background to the perspectives expressed in my blog.

Stephen

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Do you think we are already not paying enough in Cisco Tax on your products, and we have to spend more millions we don’t have on Cisco Advanced Services.. which ultimately push more Cisco *products*?

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