Cisco's transformation still a work in progress
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday. However, the company still has work to do to make that transformation complete and will need to ramp up its outreach to third-party vendors to make initiatives like its SONA (Service Oriented Networking Architecture) and Network Admission Control a reality, analysts and customers say. Cisco announced releases to its ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) product, IPS, CSA (Cisco Security Agent), CSM (Cisco Security Manager), and MARS (Mitigation Analysis and Response System) products. The enhancements will give enterprises better protection against a new generation of sophisticated and targeted attacks and an evolving "human network" of mobile and Web based technologies, Jeff Platon, Cisco's vice president of security marketing told a room full of reporters and analysts on Monday. "When you think about our role and how it's evolved, we've moved from being a packet pusher to an infrastructure company," Platon said. "And if you look at the trends, Cisco's not going to be a network vendor. Whether its voice or video in the consumer space, those requirements are going to change what Cisco becomes to the marketplace." But key elements of the company's transformation are very much works in progress that will require Cisco to forge close ties with other vendors before they bear fruit. SONA, an effort to create a service-oriented architectural framework that unifies network-based services like security, mobility, and location on virtualized platforms, will require close cooperation with third-party vendors that may be Cisco competitors in some areas, said Richard Palmer, senior vice president of Cisco's Security Technology Unit. "If we allow third-party applications to operate on our platforms like ASA and ISR, it will make for a tighter set of partners and more longevity," Palmer said. Currently, Cisco has a number of teams across the company developing SONA components for functions like authentication and control plane and data plane integration for third-party products to work on platforms like Cisco' ASA, Palmer said.Â  To promote SONA, Cisco will strike more deals like the joint marketing initiative with SAP on governance, risk, and compliance solutions, which it announced in September. Similarly, the company will need to work closely with firms like Microsoft and other third-party vendors on issues like security. Cisco and Microsoft have been hammering out an integration of their two competing NAC frameworks for more than two years, largely at the urging of enterprise customers. Palmer allowed that many enterprise customers may prefer to use features built into Windows Vista in lieu of Cisco's own CSA client software. "Clearly, what we do is driven by customer choice. Customers are saying, 'Look, we're committed to Vista, and we want you to work more closely," he said. However, Palmer said that some customers may still prefer the CSA client for endpoint security. But for Cisco's enterprise customers, choice and integration with other vendors remains a pressing issue. Patricia M. Lawicki, vice president and CIO at Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a Cisco customer since 1987, said that the company's technology plays a key part in helping PG&E restructure its IT operations after the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001 forced the company into bankruptcy. Cisco's technology is helping PG&E with a major business transformation, including the phasing out of mainframe and first-generation client-server applications, a major deployment of technology from SAP, and overhauls of supply chain and customer service systems. While PG&E is using the company's NAC appliance, Cisco's full NAC solution, which requires wholesale upgrades to its networking infrastructure, remains too expensive for PG&E to adopt, especially with the wealth of legacy Cisco hardware that would need to be replaced, Lawicki said. A committed Cisco customer, PG&E still wants to be able to choose best-of-breed solutions -- particularly in areas like security -- and is pushing Cisco and its other suppliers to make that possible, she said.
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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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The upstart chipmaker is still on the right path.
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eWeek: Security partnerships and technology advances are making it increasingly safer to keep corporate data up in the air. To better fight the threat of wireless network subterfuge, Cisco Systems Inc.
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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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Fujitsu and Cisco have announced that they have reached an agreement to enter into a strategic alliance to carry out joint development of high-end routers, plan future cooperation in routing and switching, and collaborate on quality improvement.
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Cisco Systems, the maker of Internet networking equipment, said that it was on track to meet Wall Street's estimates for 13 percent growth in revenue for fiscal 2005.
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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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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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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers Wednesday stoked the networking vendor's love affair with IT investors by pointing to the company's unified communications strategy and broad product portfolio as a way to sustain growth over the long term. At the company'sÂ annual financial analyst conference in New York, executives said Cisco will sustain double-digit growth through the rest of the decade by incorporating data, voice, video and mobile capabilities -- what it calls its "quad play" -- across product lines, while addressing the service provider, enterprise, commercial and consumer markets. "Now if youâre the innovator and the leader it protects you from the startups and the advanced players," Chambers said. Cisco expects to sustain a 10 percent to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth rate through the rest of the decade. The company will be able to take advantage of the breakdown of barriers among vertical-market product lines, as consumers and professionals increasingly expect to get both corporate data and home and family information anytime, anywhere, Chambers said. "The network becomes the platform," noted Chambers, in a frequently repeated phrase during the event. At the corporate level, product integration is fueled by a trend in businesses to move from a "command control" style of management to a more collaborative model, he said. "If you asked me a few years ago I would have said collaboration could account for maybe 10 percent to 20 percent productivity efficiency but now I would say that's closer to 30 percent to 40 percent," he said. The company is banking on business uptake of video collaboration tools to boost network traffic and the need for new infrastructure. The quad play equipment and services Cisco offers will be taken up broadly, by smaller commercial companies as well as Fortune 500 businesses, Chambers said. As an example, he pointed out that a 12-store Subway food chain in Texas has already implemented a quad-play Cisco-based system, which uses video to reduce theft. Cisco can also help companies innovate and transition to new technologies, noted Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer. Giancarlo said Cisco "reinvented the TDM PBX [time division multiplex public branch exchange] industry ... bringing it into the unified communications era" through VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) gateways and other products and services. The big question for attendees was whether Cisco can sustain growth and product leadership. The company has had 21 straight quarters where it met or exceeded Thomson Financial analyst consensus expectations, noted Chief Financial Officer Dennis Powell. The company's share price has benefited, surging by about 25 percent over the last year, compared to about 5 percent growth for the Nasdaq exchange. Powell forecast 19 percent to 21 percent growth for the quarter ending this October (including revenue from recent acquisitions), about even with Thomson Financial expectations for the first fiscal quarter, of 20.4 percent revenue growth. Conference attendees noted that so far the company has been able to deliver on its promise to expand into new markets from its traditional corporate switching and router base. One institutional investor who declined to be named noted the company has placed its Carrier Routing System-1 carrier-class product into some 60 companies. While attendees said they would like more specifics about upcoming products, several agreed that certain specifics about the business appear to position the company for further growth. For example, Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors, one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, noted Mark Sue, an analyst with brokerage RBC Capital Markets. "Of course we'd like to know when, but that is a positive sign," Sue said.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.On Monday, the company is set to unveil a datacenter networking platform that eventually could take the place of both the Ethernet switches that link servers as well as the Fibre Channel devices that form storage networks. The Nexus series is designed both to meet exploding demands for bandwidth and energy efficiency within data centers and to simplify the jobs of IT administrators. In the process, it could help give Cisco the central role it seeks in IT infrastructure.Cisco is already a leading player in datacenter networks with its&#160;Catalyst series Ethernet switches&#160;and its MDS storage network platform. Now it hopes to transcend those separate systems using a single, unified switching fabric and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. The platform it will use, called Nexus, will be a line of routing switches in chassis, rack-mounted and blade form. The first of these, the Nexus 7000 chassis, will be generally available in the second quarter. Prices will start at $75,000, but a typical configuration will cost about $200,000, according to Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group.Mark Drake is looking at the Nexus platform for future-proofing as his company, Health Management Associates, centralizes its data resources. The company runs about 60 hospitals, mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Health Management&#39;s current Catalyst switches are probably enough to handle connectivity needs in its data centers for the next two years, but it&#39;s hard to predict storage and processing requirements beyond that as he looks for the next generation, Drake said.&quot;I&#39;m looking at a little over ten years&#39; capacity,&quot; Drake said. The Nexus line is built to go far beyond the scale of the Catalysts, delivering more than 15Tbps. &quot;The capacity to grow is huge,&quot; he said.Another benefit Drake sees in the Nexus, which he has been told about but hasn&#39;t tested, is ease of management. Health Management is already trying to reduce IT staff costs by consolidating data centers from each hospital to a two main locations. Because the new platform combines storage and data switching along with security in a single switch and management interface, it could further simplify running those datacenters, he said.Initially, Cisco sees the Nexus switches at the core of datacenters that still use separate networks for processing and storage. But as FCoE emerges in storage systems, the Nexus could become the single connectivity platform, Ullal said. Its switching fabric is designed to be lossless, unlike a standard Ethernet system, which tolerates dropped packets, said Tom Edsall, senior vice president and CTO of the data center group. The platform also has built-in security features, including wire-speed encryption and authentication capability for each port.At the heart of the platform is a new, virtualized operating system, NX OS. As with server virtualization, NX OS can turn a Nexus switch into multiple logical switches running totally different processes, Ullal said . For example, one logical switch could handle storage and be managed by storage specialists, while the other links servers and is run by a different staff. A third could be a test platform. All would use a single switching fabric and set of redundant power supplies, which provides benefits in performance, economies of scale, and resiliency, she said. This virtualized architecture eventually will trickle down to other Cisco product lines, according to Ullal.Cisco also has automated some aspects of management with the Nexus line, drawing on best practices it learned partly from its customers, Edsall said. The system is designed to monitor and heal itself in many cases.The network&#39;s role in datacenters is growing as computing and storage are combined and shared, according to industry analysts. It&#39;s now the &quot;orchestrator&quot; of the datacenter, Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group said. Cisco is the only vendor with both the networking and the computing experience to fulfill that role, he believes. But though many managers of datacenters want to see total virtualization of the datacenter, which could boost efficiency, they aren&#39;t yet ready for it.&quot;We&#39;re just entering the very early stages of the virtual datacenter,&quot; Kerravala said. &quot;This is probably at least two years away.&quot;Cisco is best positioned to build the core of datacenters because the network touches everything in it, according to Ullal, Edsall, and other executives.&quot;For Cisco, it&#39;s very critical that this platform be a launching pad to go further up the IT stack,&quot; said IDC&#39;s Cindy Borovick. However, taking control of datacenters won&#39;t be a walk in the park, she cautioned.&quot;Cisco&#39;s in a very strong position, but there are other very large suppliers that recognize how important the datacenter is and are willing to invest the R&amp;D dollars,&quot; Borovick said, citing IBM and Sun Microsystems. To Cisco&#39;s peril, datacenter administrators are more than willing to buy the best of many vendors rather than standardize on one, because they control the &quot;crown jewels&quot; of the enterprise, she said.
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Cisco Systems gives its Web services business a boost with the acquisition of Reactivity.
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Tomorrow Cisco Systems Inc. will announce an upgrade to its small business and branch office line of routers, incorporating more processing speed and a raft of new features.
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Despite the return of its founder, improvement will take time.
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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.
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Move will allow Cisco channel partners to monitor their enterprise customers' networks to provide better service and support.