Cisco's Chambers adds collaboration to his name
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Cisco Systems John Chambers touts collaboration technology at Salesforce.com's user conference, Dreamforce.
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Charles Giancarlo, Cisco Systems Inc.'s chief development officer and heir-apparent to CEO John Chambers, resigned Thursday to join the investment firm Silver Lake Partners.
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In recent years, Cisco Systems (CSCO ) CEO John Chambers seemed to welcome questions from Wall Street analysts about the competition.
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VoiceCon Spring 2007 -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced new products and applications that allow organizations to use their network as a platform for more effective and more personalized business collaboration.
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(InfoWorld) - A rising tide lifts all boats, and in the world of videoconferencing, Cisco Systems' high-profile TelePresence products are boosting the market as a whole. Longtime player Tandberg is trying to make the most of the good times. In the latest move for market position, Tandberg said Thursday it plans to acquire privately held Codian, a maker of back-end infrastructure for other vendors' conferencing endpoints. The 107-employee company, based in Slough, U.K., will help Tandberg grab sales and develop new products faster as well as go after new opportunities in the IP communications market, Tandberg said. It expects the $270 million deal to close in the third quarter. Cisco's TelePresence, introduced late last year, was practically all Cisco executives would talk about when they met with financial analysts this week, and with good reason: The technology costs up to $300,000 per location and requires special design and installation work, but it looks and sounds great. Using it has already slashed Cisco's travel costs, Chairman and CEO John Chambers said. The marketing effort Cisco has been pouring into TelePresence has raised the profile of other telepresence systems, such as Hewlett-Packard's Halo and Teliris's VirtuaLive. These systems bring videoconferencing, traditionally complicated and low quality, to another level. In turn, they have put the spotlight on improvements in midrange videoconferencing systems that now feature high-definition cameras and displays and better sound. "The attention has done more for HD videoconferencing than for telepresence," she said. "The price tag (on telepresence) is still prohibitive for most enterprises." Whereas telepresence usually involves designing a whole room for a particular system, which can even include special furniture and room modifications, midrange high-definition videoconferencing may be installed in an existing conference room or as upgraded components to an existing system, IDC's Freedman said. These systems can be deployed for a fraction of the cost of telepresence. Codian makes back-end infrastructure for conferencing systems, including MCUs (multipoint control units), gateways, content servers, and management software, Tandberg said. Tandberg pledged to continue developing and supporting both its own and Codian's product lines even though both companies make, for example, MCUs. Tandberg, based in Oslo, is already working with HP to let users hook up its high-definition desktop videoconferencing systems with Halo conference rooms. Although the telepresence market is still a "corporate jet replacement" for top-level executives, the market isn't standing still, Freedman said. IDC estimated telepresence sales worldwide were just $64 million in 2006, but believes they will rise to $170 million this year and to $1 billion by 2011. Polycom, which makes a broad range of conferencing products including a telepresence system, moved to grab more of that market early this year when it acquired Destiny Conferencing for $47.6 million. The 27-employee company was already supplying core technology for Polycom's RPX telepresence product and held several patents in the area.
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Chief Executive John Chambers and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates may have different leadership styles. And their firms certainly specialize in disparate aspects of the computer-Internet spectrum.
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Cisco CEO Chambers and other executives wooed Wall Street Wednesday with predictions for sustained long-term growth.
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NEW YORK, August 23 (New Ratings) - Cisco Systems (CSCO.NAS) announced a definitive agreement today to acquire P-Cube Inc, a privately-held developer of IP service platforms, for about $200 million in cash and stock options.
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Cisco(R) (NASDAQ: CSCO) has established a state-of-the-art customer briefing center (CBC) in Singapore to showcase the latest innovations in Internet Protocol (IP) networking technology.
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NEW YORK - Cisco Systems is aggressively trying to build its presence in key growth markets, and it&#39;s using both new products and new acquisitions to do it.
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Cisco Systems Inc. , the leading maker of data networking gear, is going into the data-storage business, with a major assist from storage vendor EMC Corp. of Hopkinton.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced the creation of a physical security partner and technology ecosystem to help accelerate the development and adoption of physical security solutions that run over Internet Protocol networks.
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Cisco Systems Inc.âs chief development officer and heir-apparent to C.E.O. John Chambers, resigned Thursday to join the investment firm Silver Lake Partners.
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John Chambers, chief executive of  network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc , said on  Tuesday service providers will continue to upgrade and build  out their networks for a decade.
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Cisco CEO John Chambers says that service providers will continue Internet build-out over the next decade.
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The move won&#39;t have raised many eyebrows. Security is a hot market in which Cisco already has a strong grip in the enterprise space, and the vendor giant has already bolstered its security portfolio through
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco executives speaking at the ongoing Security Standard Conference claim that the networking giant hasn't sapped innovation in the security companies it has acquired in its efforts to add to its own expanse of IT systems-defense products, while some customers clearly feel otherwise. Taking the stage at the conference in Chicago on Monday to participate in a panel on Cisco's vision for warding off emerging threats and spam, the company's top security executives, and former IronPort Chief Executive Scott Weiss, defended the firm's growth-via-acquisition strategy. Cisco finalized its $830 million buyout of IronPort in June -- only the latest in a long string of such security acquisitions. The company has already begun blending the messaging and malware filtering gateway specialist's technologies into its firewalls, which the executives claim has created a new capability to provide customers with "wide packet inspection," an approach that adds reputation-based anti-attack capabilities to the systems' existing virus and spam detection abilities. Such integration work illustrates the fact that Cisco is improving the ability of its customers to defend their networks from attack and that the firm is serious about innovation and not just attempting to grow its revenues or boost sales of its networking gear by snapping-up other security vendors, Weiss told the assembled audience. Asked by a conference attendee whether major platform providers like Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM will continue to swallow smaller security companies, along with industry giants like Symantec, and how that will impact the availability of the cutting-edge technologies often developed by independent vendors, Weiss said that more consolidation is likely inevitable. Yet he also acknowledged that some niche players will continue to do well on their own. "All the [venture capital] firms that are into small security companies will likely make out like bandits, and there will be a scrum to get the good stuff," said Weiss, who is still heading up IronPort inside Cisco. "Bigger companies will have to decide whether to build, buy, or partner." Weiss highlighted Webroot, the anti-spyware software company that industry watchers have long tabbed for acquisition based on its specialized focus -- and which continues to defy those predictions and grow on its own -- as an example of the type of vendor that will be able to compete in a world where security is being driven further into other broadly-distributed IT platforms, such as Cisco's ubiquitous networking gear. "I think we'll continue to see new Webroots pop-up that can help deal with new threats," he said. "The issue for these companies is how broad is their platform and how to carve a significant portion of the infrastructure out; they have to ask themselves if their technology is broad enough to support a large, profitable company." Along with the benefits of melding together complimentary technologies, such as gateway filtering tools and firewalls, Weiss claims that customers are seeking integrated technologies from single vendors and increasingly looking for "one throat to choke" when selecting security tools. "Users of these technologies want products that talk to each other and have collaborative interfaces," he said. Customers worry about consolidation However, some existing Cisco customers claim that they are troubled by the continued pace of security industry consolidation. Even if Cisco can add many of the pieces that customers seek, it will likely not be able to provide technologies that are as innovative and effective as those made by independent vendors in some areas, said Waqas Akkawi, senior manager of IT security at Sirva, the moving giant that owns Allied Van Lines, Global Van Lines, and North American Van Lines, among other subsidiaries. Akkawi said that Cisco excels in some areas of security where it has experience, namely in network-based tools, but he noted that even some of those products, such as its IDS (intrusion detection systems) and IPS (intrusion prevention systems), also added via various acquisitions, don't measure up to those made by standalone providers. "Cisco is good at what they do naturally, as with firewalls, routers and switches, but they haven't done a good job on things like IPS and IDS where some other niche companies do a better job," said Akkawi. "In a lot of cases I think customers would be better off if these types of companies partnered instead of doing acquisitions or trying to build functionality into their existing products on their own. Sometimes a niche product that integrates well is going to be better than what these guys are talking about." Akkawi, who is a Cisco-certified IT pro, said that Sirva is constantly considering whether or not to go best-of-breed with independent vendors or buy into integrated security products like those being integrated by platform providers like Cisco's IronPort buyout. "These acquisitions will only work if a platform provider like Cisco can build the acquired technology into things they already do well. In some cases, these types of companies haven't been able to integrate everything they've bought, and we've seen some best-of-breed products go away," he said. "[Sirva] will likely continue to go fifty-fifty in terms of the integrated products we choose to buy, and the others we seek out to get true best-of-breed functionality." Many IT platform providers have moved aggressively in recent years to add security to their portfolios where it fits, as with EMC's buyout of authentication specialists RSA, along with IBM and HP's recent moves to add applications testing capabilities to their software development platforms via acquisition. The nature of the security industry is such that certain functions will be parceled into such widely-used technologies, while other newer tools will likely emerge from independents, said Mick Scully, vice president of product management at Cisco's Security Technology Group. Scully countered that despite any perception of cutting at innovation, Cisco is creating many new technology combinations that customers have responded well to, allowing its overall security business to crest $2 billion in revenues in the firm's fiscal 2006, representing a 25 percent annual growth rate in its overall security business. "There will always be a balance between best-of-breed and integrated security. The beauty of the market is that it is constantly changing at a rapid pace, and we will always see startups who address specific problems," Scully said. "But if you look at an acquisition like IronPort, we've left it almost entirely intact, run by the same team, even as we push its technologies into other products." Scully also highlighted the fact that Cisco has proven its chops as a security innovator, such as in creating the burgeoning market for NAC device authentication systems. He said that Cisco itself views its acquisitions as fifty-fifty propositions, looking for as many opportunities to continue to innovate the technologies its buys as it seeks opportunities to fold them into its other product lines. "It's an interesting dichotomy, I sort of see what these customers are saying, but we also believe that our standalone products, such as our NAC appliances, are already best-of-breed," Scully said. "As niche security markets become mature, merchant markets, we are going to look to get into those markets where we fit in; but we're also doing a lot of organic product development on our own, and we feel that we can offer best-of-breed capabilities in the security markets we compete in."