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Lloyd, who makes no secret of how he sees Cisco thwarting major competitors, fired shots at Microsoft, HP and Huawei, saying all three operate contrary to Cisco's so-called "work your way" strategy of enabling customers through architectural approaches to networking and business transformation.
"If you work your way with Microsoft, there's only one way -- their way," he said.
For HP, "after years of starving R&D, lack of innovation and so much money attached to the past, you don't work your way, you work the old way."
And of Huawei, Lloyd said, "If you work the Huawei way, well, I can assure you folks they're already working on the copy. Imitation isn't innovation."
Conspicuously absent from Lloyd's competitive rundown were both Avaya and Juniper, whom Cisco CEO John Chambers had mentioned earlier in the week and had identified, along with Huawei and HP, as Cisco's key four competitors in a speech to financial analysts last fall.
Solution providers have applauded Cisco's efforts to become simpler at a corporate level and easier to do business with. Lloyd said Cisco had more work to do on its systems and processes and that Cisco would continue to become more efficient.
Jere Brown, CEO, Americas at South Africa-based integrator giant Dimension Data, said Cisco's restructuring was already paying dividends in his piece of the business.
"In the past, Latin America was part of emerging markets at Cisco, so we had to deal with multiple entities within the Cisco organization," he told CRN this week. "Our goal is to drive consistent performance and delivery for our clients and that really got in the way of making that happen. Now you have the channel organization aligned with the Cisco theater, and the theaters own the money, and we know where to go to get decisions made in a much faster time for our clients. That helps a lot."
Cisco's major services announcement at Partner Summit -- the Cisco Services Partner Program (CSPP) which collapses 47 global services programs into one -- is also important, Brown stressed.
"We support global, multinational clients and we want consistency in the approach, so this allows us to do that and Cisco to do that," he said. "We're a multibillion-dollar organization so it's not easy for us to turn on a dime -- we need time to plan, transition from one program to another and make sure it doesn't impact our business and our clients. But we're excited about the changes."
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