“Over the past six months, we have reorganized the entire company. Almost 70 percent of our engineers are now doing something different for us. We had to do some very painful things like laying off 7,000 people and hiring back 6,000 with different skill sets. We have moved from selling boxes to selling outcomes.”
John Chambers.
In this recent post, I posed the question of whether the end of the network engineering role could potentially be nigh. How does the end of network engineers impact the Cisco nexus (bad pun intended) generated by their Cisco Certified programs? If we don’t need network engineers, we won’t need CCNAs, CCIEs, etc will we??
And if we don’t need Cisco Certified engineers and therefore their related training courses, does Cisco miss out on the ability to build a massive advocate network who actively sell the Cisco products that they’ve been trained on? As it currently stands, this provides Cisco with a significant competitive advantage.
But Cisco undoubtedly understands this extended value of their Cisco Certified brand. I’m sure they’ll evolve their training materials (and the brand) to train people in whatever their next generations of products / services will look like, thus building new advocates to act as sales-people on their behalf.
Interestingly, the customer-facing component of Cisco’s next generations of products / services is likely to have an increased OSS/systems feel to it, so perhaps there are a more OSS-centric set of training courses due out in the Cisco Certified programmes of the not too distant future??
Have you ever had an OSS or BSS project that’s impacted by poor data quality? The problem of data integrity gets raised on almost every
“One of my favorite things about designing software is designing the defaults. The defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. And, therefore,
Have you ever been tasked with mapping out the processes for the telco you work for? Either as a way of documenting current state, or
In the last week alone, I’ve had two potent reminders that the world of OSS is simply (pun intended) too complex. This manifests in many
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
2 Responses
What is your opinion of Cisco Prime?
Hi Matthew
In the context of this post, yes Cisco Prime does cover some aspects of the OSS of the future and the Cisco team is making significant investments in time and money to evolve the suite significantly (as well as the Tail-f and other acquisitions). Naturally they deliver training on these products but haven’t turned them into the must-have industry pseudo-standard like they have with CCNA, etc.
In the context of the product capabilities of Prime, they’re like most other OSS products – they suit some customers’s requirements.