Chambers: Cisco CEO Teams With Bill Gates To Combat Hackers
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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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But don't just blame Vista New technology such as Windows Vista and IP v6 may solve some security problems but will bring new security threats as well, according to a senior Cisco security expert.â¦
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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."
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Seattle, October 19: Microsoft Corp and Cisco Systems Inc on Monday said they would work more closely to make their products work more reliably with each other.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft and Cisco Systems played the role of proud parents on Sept. 6. But with so many questions about when NAC-NAP, as itâs been called, will be available, and how it will work with non-Windows clients and non-Cisco infrastructure, itâs been hard to figure out what the companies created. Now other companies with a dog in the NAC fight are stepping up with their own plans. Last week, it was Juniper Networks and Symantec, announcing a strategic partnership to build integrated, standards-based access control and end-point compliance solutions. The companies will integrate their end-point compliance and access control solutions, such as Juniperâs Unified Access Control and Symantecâs Sygate Enterprise Protection, to create standards-based solutions. âNAC is still immature, but itâs growing fast. Thereâs real value in collaborating in that area to drive adoption in the customer accounts we share,â said Jeremy Burton, group president of enterprise security and data management at Symantec. As opposed to Cisco and Microsoft, Juniper and Symantec will make their integration comply with the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) architecture. âWe want to make sure that what we bring to market allows customers to leverage their existing relationships,â said Hitesh Shech, vice president of security products at Juniper. The thorniest questions are about security policy definition and enforcement, which is what Symantec and Juniper focus on, Shech said. Steve Hannah, a Juniper engineer and co-chair of the TNC subgroup within the Trusted Computing Group, said architectures such as UAC, NAP, NAC, and TNC must converge. Even Microsoft is humming along to that tune. Mark Ashida, general manager of enterprise networking servers at Microsoft, said that his company has already proved NAP interoperability with other 802.1x-compliant network infrastructure providers. Microsoft will demonstrate NAC policy enforcement with gear from Enteresys, Extreme, Foundry, and Hewlett-Packard at Interop in New York this week, Ashida said. That all makes Cisco more Microsoftâs âMr. Right Now,â than âMr. Right.â
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Giants team on giant white paper Microsoft and Cisco Systems have detailed plans for interoperability between systems designed to enforce security policies on Windows PCs and servers.â¦
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VoiceCon Spring 2007 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced their intent to deliver a new platform for unified communications and collaboration client development.
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By Eric Auchard and Daniel Sorid BEIJING  - Cisco Systems Inc.  Chief Executive John Chambers said China was well on the way to becoming the world's technology hub as he revealed plans for his company's first research center in the country.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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(InfoWorld) - Triple plays are rare in baseball. But Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers plans to do one better Wednesday by promising to pull off a "quadruple play" in the networking business: incorporating data, voice, video, and mobile capabilities across its product lines. Chambers, speaking at the company's annual analyst conference in New York City, said the unified communications strategy would be necessary to sustain Cisco's growth in the next decade and stave off competition from startups and pure-play vendors in those areas. Saying "the network becomes the platform," Chambers predicted product integrations fueled by a business trend to move to more collaborative management models. That change will make video collaboration tools more important, boosting network traffic and the need for new infrastructure downstream, he said. Cisco will also update earlier product lines with features that will allow service providers to have more quality control over applications, according to Mike Volpi, senior vice president of the company's routing and service provider technology group. The idea is that with more controls, providers can charge more for premium services, and generally upgrade application features. For example, the 12000 Series routers will add per-session control for business VOIP and video in this fiscal year, he said. The 7600 Series routers will gain per-session controls and subscriber-aggregation features, he said. 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. Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors. This is one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, said 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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IBM and Cisco Systems unveiled product updates that will link technology from the two companies more closely together to protect customer networks from security threats.
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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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Cisco completes interoperability with Microsoft security platform, forges marketing alliance with SAP.
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Cisco Systems and Microsoft have announced a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.
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Top Layer Networks--  Who:   Mike Paquette, Chief Strategy Officer- Top Layer Networks  What:  Mike Paquette will be among a panel of the leading security experts at the 2007 RSA Conference discussing Intrusion Prevention Systems and the next generation of network security.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc. executives looked to video, the developing world, and still-emerging technologies as they kicked off the company's C-Scape analyst conference Tuesday. Many of the killer applications of the next few years will involve video, said President and Chief Executive Officer John Chambers, who demonstrated the Cisco Digital Media Player and Digital Media Manager, a system for easily publishing images, text and video to flat-panel displays via Ethernet. He also highlighted the company's recently unveiled Telepresence Meeting system and infrastructure for service providers to deliver video to TVs, PCs and handheld devices. Chambers also sees a bright spot in developing countries, especially India, where Cisco last week opened a manufacturing facility and said it would set up a globalization center and invest in research and development. One high-level executive has already moved his family to India and ten more will go in the next six months, he said. India is a country that knows how to partner, and Cisco hopes to work with government, service providers and enterprises there as well as seeking partnerships in China and other emerging countries, Chambers said. Cisco can still innovate, said Chief Development Officer Charles Giancarlo, taking the stage after Chambers. It is diving into areas that had been considered boring and unchanging, such as enterprise phone systems, and transforming them through IP (Internet Protocol) technology, Giancarlo said. Video surveillance is another of those markets. Combining many types of video that have been on specific networks and putting them over IP creates many new possibilities, he said. "We may actually get to be known as a video company." Trying to get a head start on new technologies, Cisco is now forming internal entrepreneurial teams to capture the innovation potential within the company. The teams, which include sales, marketing and manufacturing personnel as well as experts in research and development, are meant to harness innovation within the massive networking company that has gotten many of its technologies by buying startups, Giancarlo said. These teams are going out ahead of what Cisco calls its Advanced Technologies, existing categories such as storage networking and security. Looking farther out, Cisco sees itself at the core of fully virtual computing systems. Network switches are becoming faster than the interfaces inside computers, so virtualized processing, storage and other components can all be spread out and linked together on the fly through the network in the next 10 years, Giancarlo said. That vision is probably accurate, but in trying to form the core of those systems, Cisco faces a new challenge, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. It will be going head-to-head against giants such as Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp., a much tougher lot than its current networking rivals, most of which have been mismanaged, he said. The problem will be multiplied as Cisco expands into many more technology areas, Kerravala added.
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IBM and Cisco have extended their global security alliance through the integration of IBM Tivoli software with Cisco Network Admission Control technologies to help enterprises automatically comply with security policies, then quarantine and remediate at