10 competitors Cisco couldn’t kill off
Cisco
CEO John Chambers loves to talk about the companies that have tried to
compete with Cisco and failed. He refers to companies like 3com, Nortel,
Synoptics, etc — and he's right. However, here are 10 companies that
have managed to thrive in this era of Cisco dominance and have stood the
test of time.
F5 Networks
Load
balancing was once considered a market that would rapidly be
commoditized, but F5 has managed to create sustainable differentiation
as the "L4-7" market has evolved into "Application Delivery Controllers"
(ADCs). F5 today has the broadest and deepest application relevancy and
can significantly reduce the deployment time and improve the
performance of applications, such as SharePoint and Exchange. F5's
strategy has worked so well that it caused Cisco to dump its own product
in favor of partnering with the No. 2 vendor, Citrix.
Riverbed
One can
argue the technical merits of Riverbed's Steelhead versus Cisco's WAAS.
From people I have interviewed who have tested the two products,
Riverbed can accelerate the performance of a broader range of
applications than Cisco, but for many of the core enterprise
applications, WAAS is close. However, the real reason many customers buy
Riverbed is that it's fast to deploy and easy to manage. I also think
Riverbed has done a great job of creating sustainable differentiation,
after adding application optimization features over the years.
Juniper
One might
look at this and scratch his head, particularly enterprise network
managers. While I agree that Juniper's enterprise initiatives have
floundered over the years, the company is the de facto No. 2 vendor in
the service provider routing space. Cisco and Juniper tend to leap-frog
one another in technical superiority. But Juniper's latest releases
include the T4000, MX and PTX lines, which are great products and should
fuel the Cisco-versus-Juniper SP wars into the foreseeable future.
Arista
How's this
for respect? Just a couple of years old and joining the ranks of some
long-time Cisco competitors. But Arista seems to have the right mindset
to create sustainable differentiation against Cisco in the data center. I
had a chance to sit down with Doug Gourlay at Interop and he talked a
lot about the value of staying focused. Arista will not venture into
markets like ADCs or Metro Ethernet, and will remain laser-focused on
data center networking. In fact, he said Arista wants to be to the data
center what Juniper is to SP routing, and that's the industry’s de facto
No. 2.
Polycom
There's
arguably no company that did more good for Polycom than Cisco. Cisco's
acquisition of Tandberg was supposed to kill off the niche video vendor,
correct? That didn't happen, and Cisco's incidentally created a rising
tide for both companies. Initially, Polycom wasn't able to do much with
the opportunity created by Cisco. In 2010, though, Polycom gutted its
management team and CEO Andy Miller re-tooled the company to compete.
Some smart people and good execution on Polycom's part, combined with
some slow product cycles on Cisco’s part, allowed Polycom to grab some
market share.
Aruba Networks
Over
the past five years, Aruba's share in Wi-Fi has more than doubled and
is now in the high teens. While this hasn't all been at Cisco's expense
(Aruba has taken share from Motorola as well), Aruba did implement a
"Trojan Horse" strategy with its Airwave management tools a number of
years ago. Aruba accepted that Cisco customers buy Cisco hardware, and
sold Airwave into those environments to manage the solution. Then the
company jumped all over the 802.11n upgrade cycle and used the Airwave
footprint to grab some share.
Brocade
Brocade has
been the market and technology leader in Fibre Channel switching for
years now. It was first to have 8 Gig FC, 16 and will likely get to 32
Gig first as well. Despite much of the hype around FCoE, Brocade has
kept its focus on delivering faster and more feature-rich FC and now
owns about two-thirds of the market. The company appears to have a real
shot now, as the shift to fabrics and software defined networks (SDNs)
require data networks to be more efficient, resilient and reliable —
like a storage fabric.
HP
Under John
McHugh, HP Networking came out of nowhere and went from relative
obscurity to the No. 2 share vendor almost overnight. HP caught Cisco
sleeping and managed to grab some share with value buyers at the access
edge. Since then, Cisco has countered with purpose-built products that
are more in line with HP pricing. HP then countered by acquiring 3Com to
refresh its portfolio and challenge Cisco in the data center. Both
companies are building integrated data center "stacks," so we should
expect to see the once-great partners remain bitter rivals as the battle
for the data center rages on.
Microsoft
There's
no vendor that I can remember in recent history that has been more
problematic for Cisco than Microsoft. Lync, Microsoft's UC solution,
introduced new buyers into the mix that have the same level of loyalty
to Redmond as network engineers have to Cisco. Cisco has spent countless
hours trying to prove that its solution is not only more reliable than
Lync, but cheaper and broader. This may be true, but customers buy Lync
because of Microsoft familiarity, and that's a tough value proposition
to compete with.
Avaya
Before there
was a Cisco-versus-Microsoft battle, there was Cisco versus Avaya. Most
people don't realize this, but through its acquisition of Nortel, Avaya
actually has over 20% share in voice (not VoIP, but all voice) meaning
they control 1 out of every 5 business phones. Under Kevin Kennedy the
company has streamlined much of its business, making it more agile than
it was in the past, and it will continue to be a threat in the UC space.
