Cisco's router market takes a hit
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Company reports a decline in its router business during its quarterly earnings, which barely met analyst expectations.
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Cisco Systems Inc. , the biggest maker of network gear for directing Internet traffic, on Monday said it will introduce a new line of low-end routers in the coming weeks aimed at winning more corporate business.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems executives hinted at major changes in the company's consumer strategy on Wednesday even as theyÂ voiced optimism about networkingÂ and the world economy. The vendor boughtÂ LinksysÂ to enter the home networking market in 2003 and recently has gone deeper into the consumer market by acquiring video infrastructure and set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta. It's one of several new directions for Cisco, a large, 23-year-old company looking for continuing revenue growth. Cisco's consumer business brings in about $3.5 billion per year and is growing between 10 percent and 20 percent per year. That's compared with nearly $35 billion in total revenue for the company's last fiscal year. But Chairman and CEO John Chambers believes consumer-oriented technologies such as social networking have a big future in enterprises and wants to bring new capabilities to homes, such as a less expensive version ofÂ Cisco's TelePresence conferencing system. Meanwhile, Microsoft and other IT vendors have designs on networked home entertainment, too. The company will never be a majority player in consumer electronics by following its current path, Chambers said during a roundtable discussion with reporters on Wednesday. Cisco is used to being the dominant player in an industry, as its switching and routing businesses are juggernauts. "One of the major decisions we face in the next twelve months ... is, are we going to continue along the current path ... and is there a path that gives up sustainable differentiation, especially given where the markets are going?" Chambers said. Collaboration, TelePresence, and unified voice, text, and video communications are among the technologies he expects to see in that arena. One change that's likely to happen eventually is theÂ demise of the Linksys brand, which Chambers has hinted at before but Cisco has hastened to downplay. It will take time, he noted. "Linksys often has a higher brand recognition to the retail consumer, but over time you'll see us move under the whole Cisco brand," Chambers said. This is the reason Cisco streamlined its logo last year, he said. The company also wants to establish an "audio brand," a sound people associate with the company, he added. The San Jose, California, company has much to gain from better home broadband, and Cisco believes local government is a major hurdle in the U.S. "I think the developing countries are out-executing the U.S. broadband buildout," including slashing their prices faster, Chambers said. Before they can improve the key "last mile" of networks to homes and businesses in the U.S., service providers have to negotiate with local governments and work through complex regulations, said Charles Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer. Clearing the path requires municipalities recognizing broadband as a priority similar to water and electricity, he said. The executives downplayed municipal wireless initiatives in the wake of EarthLink Inc.'s pullback from that industry. "Eventually, major service providers will get into the provisioning of broadband wireless and will follow a traditional service-provider model," Giancarlo said. However, Chambers cautioned that others will step in if the carriers drag their feet on broadband. "When it isn't provided from the traditional way ... we as individual users or companies will look for other ways," Chambers said. Giancarlo took a jab at Cisco's key competitor in unified communications when asked about Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, launching in October. It may combine collaboration with voice features, but it probably won't be an effective full telephony system, he said. "I expect it to be, frankly, somewhat of a 1.0 product in the real-time communications area," Giancarlo said. However, Cisco does have a number of projects with Microsoft to incorporate OCS features such as presence federation into Cisco's CallManager platform, he added. As it wrapped up a daylong conference with financial analysts at its headquarters, Chambers said the future for Cisco looks bright. Most of Cisco's customers believe the world economy is in good shape and central banks will be able to handle possible credit problems caused by home foreclosures in the U.S., he said. Cisco expects service providers to keep up big spending on infrastructure, though the enterprise networking industry may be bumpy, he added. Â
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By Bobby White  At a Cisco Systems Inc. sales meeting in Las Vegas last month, new marketing chief Susan Bostrom took the stage to deliver an unorthodox message: Cisco, she said, was no longer just a company that provides network equipment.
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Two recent studies, one of enterprise router users, the other of LAN switch users, confirm that customers consider Cisco the top dog of the router and switch industry.  The studies, released by analyst firm Infonetics Research, validate a trend seen in previous years.
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Cisco Systems sees a big market for WiMax, but not primarily in high-profile deployments in the developed world such as&#160;Sprint Nextel&#39;s nationwide network, planned for commercial launch in the U.S. next year.Cisco&#39;s acquisition of Navini Networks, expected to close in January, will make it a vendor of wireless radios to carriers for the first time, even though it has been selling the infrastructure behind all kinds of radios for several years. The prospect of getting in early on a market transition was one thing that made WiMax attractive, according to Brett Galloway, vice president and general manager of Cisco&#39;s wireless networking business unit.But the main opportunity Cisco sees is in building networks in developing countries, initially to bring broadband to stationary users, company executives said Wednesday at the annual C-Scape analyst conference in San Jose, California. That&#39;s a long way from the vision of mobility that Intel and other big backers of WiMax promoted for several years. Even an Intel executive on a panel with the Cisco executives played up WiMax as an alternative to DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable broadband. That&#39;s likely to be the role of WiMax for the foreseeable future in markets with poor or no wired infrastructure, said Sriram Viswanathan, general manager of the WiMax Program Office at Intel Capital. But he&#39;s not giving up on mobile WiMax there.&quot;We see that as almost an entry step for these markets to get onto the mobility bandwagon,&quot; Viswanathan said.The carriers in developing countries are insisting on gear based on IEEE 802.16e, the standard for mobile WiMax, rather than on an earlier specification limited to fixed services, said Roger Dorf, president and CEO of Navini. They want the capability to eventually offer a mobile service, especially because many such carriers have both wired and wireless divisions, he said. But right now, Cisco sees WiMax giving many residents of poorer countries, who overwhelmingly still use desktop PCs, their first broadband experience. Desktops will dominate those markets for the next two years, in Dorf&#39;s view.Cisco isn&#39;t dismissing WiMax for advanced countries, just identifying the most attractive market to start with, Galloway said. However, the executives don&#39;t see much potential in unlicensed WiMax, such as deployments across large enterprise campuses. The unlicensed variety will remain a niche product, primarily for point-to-point backhaul links, Galloway said.Mobile WiMax is designed so it can be used without an external antenna or gateway box, so a user should be able to take a notebook or other portable device anywhere in the network&#39;s coverage area and connect. But some analysts say this &quot;nomadic&quot; capability is a far cry from the true mobility that cellular technologies have been designed to deliver from the beginning. WiMax will complement but not compete with future high-speed versions of 3G systems, namely LTE (Long-Term Evolution), the next step in the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology track, according to Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates.Cisco isn&#39;t taking sides in the next-generation radio fight, said Larry Lang, vice president and general manager of Cisco&#39;s Services and Mobility Business Unit. Cisco will win in any case because it supplies the IP (Internet Protocol) packet infrastructure that will link different access networks together, he said.The company does see an affinity between WiMax and Wi-Fi, where it is a dominant player. Both are IP-based and standardized, and no one company has dominated innovation in either technology, Galloway said. Simply the advent of a new type of portable broadband experience is good news for the network giant.&quot;If we drive innovation on end devices and applications, and we drive the penetration and ubiquity of networks ... we create enormous value for Cisco ... for the ecosystem ... and for our customers,&quot; Galloway said.&#160;
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Cisco has bought IP service control vendor P-Cube of Sunnyvale, California, in a cash deal worth about $200m. The company says the deal should allow its customers to run advanced IP services such as voice
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European equities fell on Thursday as technology shares lost ground after Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) in the US warned of weak demand.
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Cisco Systems Inc.  on  Wednesday said it has turned the corner on its routers business  and saw growing opportunities to expand its consumer strategy  with new video technologies.
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By JORDAN ROBERTSON  SAN FRANCISCO - Cisco Systems Inc.'s second-quarter profit surged nearly 40 percent as the world's largest maker of networking gear benefited from equipment upgrades to support bandwidth-hogging video downloads.  For the quarter ended Jan.
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Cisco Systems, the world&#39;s largest maker of equipment that routes traffic across the Internet, barely met analyst expectations on Tuesday when it reported quarterly earnings and noted a sequential decline in revenues for its IP router business.
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Cisco Systems Inc  CEO John Chambers said on Wednesday his company was hit by "dramatic decreases" in orders from U.S. banks, triggering concerns about its growth prospects and sending its shares plunging.
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Japanese computer maker Fujitsu has joined hands with Cisco to manufacture high-end routers and switches for the Japanese market. Cisco would be manufacturing the devices, which would be sold in Japan under a co-branded name.
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Cisco Systems Inc.  is  expected to post higher quarterly sales as companies upgraded  their communications networks, but analysts say the outlook is  clouded by an economic slowdown and mergers among rivals.
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Cisco Systems has reported first-quarter profits of $1.4 on sales of $6 billion. Despite cautious spending by its corporate customers, softness in the global economy and a lingering uncertainty over whether
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Fujitsu and Cisco have joined hands to produce high-end routers and switches for the Japanese market. Ever since Cisco acquired a few brands earlier this year, its goal was to increase its market shares throughout the world, which didnât happen.
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Cisco Systems Inc.'s second-quarter profit surged nearly 40 percent as the world's largest maker of networking gear benefited from equipment upgrades to support bandwidth-hogging video downloads.  For the quarter ended Jan.