Trawling through the mess and majesty of Twitter I came across an online survey from Cisco about the cloud. Of course, I was intrigued. I have not spent too much time following Cisco since the rise of the cloud. They are survivors in the cloud but have always been too product-centric for me, and never really understood the changing role of legacy vendors in the cloud. They are still there, doing better than some, not as well as others.
Credit where credit is due, it performs much better than many of its legacy competitors. It is still there, doing better than some, not as well as others. There is always a major blind spot if the Twitter presence is any guide. Cisco had an online survey asking the Twitterverse to tell it what the biggest challenge to cloud adoption is:
- Application Management
- Cost
- Operations
- Security
These are all valid reasons, but reasons for a technology product company, not a cloud provider. They were also valid 5 years ago.
Now the focus is deeper than infrastructure. Key impediments to cloud adoption are much more focused on business issues. These include lack of management engagement or a mismatched digital strategy.
Whilst Cisco continues to believe that product and internal IT-based issues are what impedes cloud adoption, it will never have a seat at the table for enterprise transformation driven by the cloud. It will be reduced to a bit player, whilst Google, AWS and others enable to business transformation.
Capture Point
In one online survey, Cisco highlighted what is wrong with legacy IT towards the cloud and why the gulf between legacy vendors and cloud platforms is only growing. It has not appeared to have met the challenge yet of the transition, so it is unlikely that it will be able to in the future unless it makes even more radical changes to perspective as well as products.
Trusted Advisors in Emerging Technology 
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