Cisco is not & will not be able to enter into the ZigBee market.
Cisco's "ultra-premium" AP range, starting with the 4800 and further extending to the 9130, 9136, 9166 and 9178, have ZigBee radios, HOWEVER, Cisco has disabled them because, according to Cisco (read between the lines), "there is no demand". Aruba and Ruckus are two other vendors to support ZigBee. While Cisco is targeting the highly elusive high-end market, Aruba and Ruckus have set their sights lower, with Aruba introducing the AP-USB-ZB as an affordable retro-fit. The biggest hurdle to "customer adaption" is Cisco themselves.
Everybody knows the biggest users of ZigBee are the hotel, resorts and hospitality industry. But a dirty secret has been blown wide open during the pandemic: No matter the size of the hotel, the name or the number of stars found in aggregators, decades of throat cutting with razor thin margins have left hotels and resorts at a knife's edge between staying afloat or disappearing altogether. This target market simply do not have more-than-enough spare money to splurge on excessive new toys, like ZigBee APs, some people in Cisco think they have.
And replacing the APs is not just the end of the story. Potential ZigBee customers will be faced with additional costs, such as switch replacement to support PoE++ hungry APs, brand new WLC, DNAC, DNAC Spaces, Catalyst Cloud and other hidden costs. While Aruba and Ruckus targets client "who can afford" their APs, Cisco continues to price themselves out off the table. And this is just acquisition cost.
Maintenance and operation of a Cisco ZigBee network will be bear the hallmark of Cisco: It will be overly complicated, labour intensive & massively complex. This means a specially trained individual or team who knows how to operate, maintain and troubleshoot, they need to know how to use DNAC, DNA Spaces, Catalyst Cloud and other associated over-the-top platform tied to ZigBee when current ZigBee operators are completely "plug that in and forget it even existed".
For an industry struggling to find low paid staff to fill their ranks daily, finding one (or even a team) of specialist who is remotely knowledgeable will be a big ask. Finding them is one thing. Keeping them in the payroll is another.
At the end of the day, potential Cisco ZigBee customers will be looking at two Bill of Material spreadsheets: One for Cisco and another if they maintained their present direction (i. e. Continue using the EoL/EoS BLE kit, including sourcing from used markets, until stocks are extinguished). And they just might look at to the Cisco representatives and say, "Don't call us. We'll call you."
