Cisco Goes For the Small-Business Market
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New IP switches and routers that can be used to build converged voice, video, and data networks are aimed at business with limited IT resources.
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Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday will introduce new products aimed at protecting and expanding one of its biggest sources of revenue &#151; computer-networking equipment for small businesses and branch offices.
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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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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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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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Cisco is set to unveil a data-center networking platform that  could take the place of switches that link servers as well as  Fibre Channel devices.
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Although many IT managers have accepted paying premium prices for Cisco's networking devices, some users and analysts said Cisco products aren't quite as pricey as they used to be.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc., the techie's tech company, is learning how to please novice users. The shift comes as the company both moves into the consumer arena through service providers and its Linksys brand, and tries to give networks a bigger role in enterprise applications that face regular employees, Cisco's development and marketing chiefs said Wednesday at the C-Scape analyst conference in San Jose, California. Video has emerged as a prime topic at this year's conference as Cisco absorbs set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta and aims to equip its service provider customers with the infrastructure for triple-play or quad-play services. Those bundles, including data, voice, video and eventually mobile service, are expected to be the lifeblood of carriers in the future. Along with Linksys consumer gear, they will make Cisco much more of a consumer company, said Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer and president of Linksys. "While I don't expect us to be the equivalent of Sony any time soon, more and more we'll be in front of the consumer, and more and more we'll be certainly in front of the business user, with our phones, with the user interface on the PCs, with Telepresence, et cetera," Giancarlo said. The Telepresence Meeting system, a high-quality video and audio system Cisco unveiled earlier this year for enterprises, is likely to reach home users within three to four years, Giancarlo said. Cisco's development approach is changing as the consumer and enterprise worker experience becomes more important, he said. Even network administrators may benefit, as the company is giving its switches and routers the intelligence to do more configuration on their own. In a wide-ranging, moderated discussion, Giancarlo also laid out some future visions. One area of networking where Cisco has had some holes is the wide-area wireless arena, he acknowledged. The company probably won't go into the radio or cellular equipment business, seeing its role instead as building infrastructure for carriers to deliver the same content across IP (Internet Protocol) to different devices. Cisco will also take steps this year to flesh out the SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture) initiative it announced at last year's analyst meeting. SONA is designed to give the network a greater role in enterprise applications. Much effort in SONA this year will be focused on unified communications, the combination of different forms of IP communications and blending of them with applications, Giancarlo said. Cisco also plans SONA components for mobility and security, he said. The company, with as many as 90 million consumer devices in homes already, plans a big push in that area at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, said Chief Marketing Officer Sue Bostrom. She and Giancarlo were vague about whether Cisco will keep the Linksys and Scientific-Atlanta brands alive. The executives downplayed Microsoft's new competitive threat in unified communications. "Some people looked at it as a new and powerful entrant coming into the market. I viewed it as five powerful existing players leaving the market. Because I think it said, 'It's all about unified communications, it's not about hybrid PBXes,'" Giancarlo said, referring to the PBXes (private branch exchanges) sold by telephony vendors such as Nortel Networks Corp. and Avaya Inc. that combine traditional and IP telephony.
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(InfoWorld) - When Cisco meets analysts Wednesday at an annual conference about its business outlook, the dominant networking player will bring a good financial record and an even more impressive forecast. Rapidly expanding beyond its traditional routing and switching businesses into voice, video, wireless, and other categories,Â the company now sees gold in collaboration using Web 2.0 technologies. Last month, when it reported results for its fourth quarter and 2007 fiscal year, Cisco upped its forecast for quarterly revenue growth, year over year, to between 12 percent and 17 percent on average. That prediction is likely to be a hot topic at the conference, taking place at Cisco's San Jose, California, headquarters. That's impressive for a company that's anything but a startup with a market capitalization of about $200 billion and annual revenue of nearly $35 billion. Even Microsoft's quarterly revenue hasn't consistently been growing that fast in recent years. The new forecast is a jump up from a previous standing estimate of 10 percent to 15 percent that was controversial when first made a few years ago. Analysts credit smart moves and generally good execution in entering new technology areas as well as strength in its core markets for the company's ongoing success. Real-time communications of all kinds, including voice, data, social networking, and a form of high-quality videoconferencing Cisco calls Telepresence, will drive continued growth, Chairman and CEO John Chambers said last month. The company has aggressively acquired to capture new markets,Â buying video infrastructure vendor Scientific-AtlantaÂ last year andÂ online collaboration service WebExÂ earlier this year, in addition to many smaller players. But its followup is just as important, according to Brian Riggs of Current Analysis, who specializes in communications. Cisco doggedly builds on the products it acquires and modifies its lineup to meet customer demands as it did with its Smart Business Communications System for small businesses earlier this year, Riggs said. Cisco also seems to have a smarter approach to developing markets than do other first-world tech companies, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Starting at the top with heads of state and convincing governments of the value of Cisco's technology, the company sells into poorer countries without eroding its profit margin, he said. Threats still loom, however. Microsoft is getting ready to take on Cisco's unified communications architecture with Office Communications Server 2007 despite the two companies' pledge last month to work together. Hewlett-Packard's well-priced ProCurve products are gaining in enterprise LANs, F5 Networks could threaten Cisco in data centers, and there's a danger of Cisco's infrastructure gear becoming a commodity unless the company keeps innovating, Kerravala said. However, Chambers's rhetoric and Cisco's results also say something about the industry as a whole, he said. Sales of HP and Foundry Networks's enterprise products are also growing in a cycle that Kerravala attributes to upgrading networks that were built in advance of Y2K. "At first glance, you can say he's being overly optimistic, but on the other hand, he's rarely wrong," Kerravala said.
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Cisco Systems is shaking up its network management with the release of two new switches. Aimed at mid-sized enterprises, the switches acknowledge that there are large numbers of people who are not confident
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Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO.O on Tuesday   launched a Web-based product to help businesses deliver live   and on-demand videos to large groups, in its latest push to   expand into the enterprise video market.
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Cisco Systems (Quote, Chart) will announce a new router family on Tuesday that includes products for small and medium businesses. The Integrated Services Router line delivers converged voice and data applications
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The ground rules of the tests of Cisco and Avaya systems.
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Cisco Systems today launched across the GCC an integrated marketing campaign designed to promote its suite of tailored network solutions and products for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
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Cisco Systems&#39; $2 billion push into the SMB space is forcing it to re-evaluate the role it has assigned its upstart Linksys division.
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A small company learns to think big -- meeting the needs of its enterprise-class customers -- by building an infrastructure it can count on.
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Cisco Systems has sealed an alliance with Fujitsu in a bid to boosts its Japanese market presence. Under the terms of the deal, Fujitsu will act as a reseller for Cisco&#39;s high-end routing systems.