[c-nsp] FIB scale on ASR9001

[Mark Tinka]

On 11/10/21 08:48, Saku Ytti wrote:

> Ranting and raving follows.
>
> All (smart) executives claim the upside is because of their leadership
> and downside is because of the market. While no data supports that
> replacing executive A with executive B improved or reduced company
> performance, that is, we don't know what qualities make companies fail
> or succeed.
>
> But I admire the beauty of something like this: https://exainfra.net/about-us/
> 'Under Xs’ leadership, GTT bought over 40 companies and grew annual
> revenues from $65 million to over $1.6 billion during his tenure'

I call this the "bottom line factor". People do not care about details 
anymore, both on the consumer side, and on the provider side. They just 
bottom line their experience based on who was in charge.

Odd, then, that Steve Jobs had success, failure and success, at Apple, 
with the last bout totally blowing the whole game out the water. After 
all, if Apple nearly collapsed under him, then the metrics suggest he'd 
have no chance of reviving it.

But...


> Having said that, 5y performance:
> SP500: 110%
> CSCO: 90%
> NOK: 20%
> JNPR: 10%
> PANW: 300%
> ANET: 450%
>
> So Cisco is losing to the wide market only very little, and is
> outperforming other SP vendors (Huawei excluded). So the market
> doesn't entirely agree with your assertion of user base attrition.

... I think the question was about loyal customers. Cisco know how to 
drum up new business, and they know how to increase cash output from 
existing business. But none of this suggests that this business is loyal.

There does come a time where you can't keep adding new business, to keep 
showing growth. Unless, of course, you buy everything up and grow that 
way, which we know Cisco love to do. But even that has a shelf life. 
Dodge it as you may, but eventually, you need to provide value to the 
paying customer base, and that always catches up with you.

Mark.