M&A fallout: Cisco may have ditched Invicta after buying Whiptail

Article is here, take it as a rumor until we hear from them. My comments: First, M&A; is hard. You need a good fit product wise (little overlap and great complementary functions/capabilities), and a culture/people fit matter. Second, sales teams need to be on-board selling complete solutions involving the acquired tech. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, for any number of reasons, some fixable, some not. Third, Cisco is out of the storage game if this is true. Its worth noting that this perfectly illustrates one of the points we make when we are on a sales call and are told that a customer wants to buy the “safe” choice, from a known brand name. Safe? Really? If you have business dependencies upon this, how is this choice safe? Because of the brand name? How’s that Sun gear holding up? etc. We hear this less and less these days, with people realizing that value comes in many size company packages, and risk is much more than brand. If your entire company is hit by a bus, can your customers keep working with their kit and hire others to support it? For us, the answer is a resounding and unqualified “YES”, and we state it quite succinctly … Bricking not included. Worth considering before you plunk down money for things … can you support it if the supplier is reorg’ed out of existence. In many cases, the answer is no, for gear/processes that are not open.