Cisco: You'll Find Bigfoot Before You'll Find This Tech That Competes With Us

Whoever is writing the marketing materials at Cisco these days has a sense of humor.

Cisco recently polled more than 1,300 IT professionals in 13 countries to get their take on a variety of technology trends. In its 2013 Global IT Impact Survey, released Wednesday, Cisco uses vivid – and sometimes hilarious – imagery to jazz up what would otherwise be a series of dry figures about challenges IT folks face in getting their jobs done.

It’s rare that Elvis, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot get mentioned in an IT survey, but Cisco managed to work in references to all three.

It's goal was to show that real-world software-defined networking deployments are tough to find. It's not surprising that Cisco would make this discovery since SDN, which turns the high-end control features in switches and routers into software that can run on cheaper hardware, could threaten Cisco and other networking vendors.

SDN is still a really young technology, too.

Still, as Cisco noted, 71% of those polled said they’re planning to deploy SDN on their networks this year. Cisco is planning to fight back with its own SDN software that will sit on top of its networking hardware.

Besides poking fun at its rival tech, SDN, Cisco had a laugh about the general way IT departments work, too.

It said that 35% of respondents are “somewhat confident” in their IT departments’ ability to respond to the company's business needs. That's “equal to their perceived ability to do ‘Gangnam Style’ moves," Cisco quipped.

Another 18% of respondents said they’d “rather break out of prison or train for a triathlon than ask for additional budget” to speed the progress of stalled projects, Cisco said in the report.

The poll also found that 42% of respondents are as “familiar" with a concept called The Internet Of Things (IoT) as they are with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The IoT is when wireless chips are used to connect cars, home appliances and other physical objects to the Internet. Nearly half, 48%, think the IoT will create business opportunities.