Jeff, you said "Most importantly, we didn't take advantage of the fact that Cisco has more information about and experience in networking than anyone else in the world."

Perhaps the solution is to increase Cisco employee incentives for cross-silo collaboration -- particularly between the Product and Services teams.

I believe that Cisco will need to acknowledge the various distinct market segments that will emerge for the evolution of networking as we know it. Case in point; large customers such as AT&T and Verizon (Facebook and Amazon in enterprise) will likely continue to closely align their SDN/NFV consideration with open hardware assessments -- all are active in the Open Compute Project.

In contrast, small and medium size companies will likely consider the advantages of SDN without the equal focus on bare metal platforms, because they have more modest investments in infrastructure. Granted, some vertical industry clusters may pursue a path that's similar to the larger companies.

Regardless, in each of these scenarios the role of Cisco professional services talent could be the deciding factor that wins the customer's trust.

My point: current deployments are still in the early-adopter stage of market development -- and that's why those new to SDN/NFV technology appreciate the "lessons learned" insights that can be gained by dealing with a full-service provider, such as Cisco.

What's your thoughts? Do you see an upside for more value-added offerings -- beyond the current anticipated cost-savings debate about the promise of SDN/NFV technologies?