Cisco hires Santa to hawk video phone
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And to help sick kids Cisco Systems has done the near impossible and put Santa on its payroll.â¦
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BEIJING -- Cisco Systems Inc. plans to open a research and development (R&D) center in Shanghai that will focus on developing VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, the company's chief executive officer (CEO) said Thursday.
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Juniper Networks claims to have added an important piece of technology for delivering on its integrated network security strategy as part of the launch of its high-speed EX-Series of enterprise switches.With onboard capabilities aimed at extending security functions, including applications usage visibility and NAC (network access control), among others, Juniper executives said that the devices -- the company's first set of high-performance switches targeted directly at enterprises, versus its existing systems aimed at telecommunications providers -- allow the networking gear provider to address demands being made by large customers.As enterprises replace aging networks with new high-performance equipment, security capabilities are high on the lists of core features that buyers are requesting, said Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager of the Service Layer Technology Business Group at Juniper.?While the infrastructure-defense tools represent only one aspect of the larger push to make networks faster and more reliable to support business operations, they have become an increasingly central element of customers' long-term goals, the executive said.Increased integration capabilities established between the new switches and Juniper's existing access control, firewall, intrusion prevention and UTM (unified threat management) products is the most significant aspect of the devices' added security functions, according to Bauhaus. "This truly builds on our strength to do end-to-end security integration," he said. "We're not looking to become a pure-play security vendor, but these are features that customers are looking for in building high-performance networking infrastructure."In addition to allowing for more unified, integrated security throughout their networking architecture, Bauhaus said that customers are looking to onboard security functions as a way to save money and reduce complexity by replacing other devices, including inline NAC appliances. "Customers clearly want to collapse the sheer number of special-use security devices," he said. "And with the integration to our Unified Access Control technology, we think that this launch represents another important stepping stone by providing customers with the ability to utilize unified access with additional support from their infrastructure."While rival Cisco Systems has been positioning itself as much as a provider of security tools as a networking specialist for the last several years, at least in terms of its marketing image, Bauhaus said that Juniper is more interested in being viewed as a leading provider of high-speed gear that offers embedded security and standards-based ties to network-defense tools offered by other vendors. All of the security functionality being integrated into the EX-Series switches and Juniper's networking gear is focused primarily on fostering high-performance infrastructure for customers that is also safe and reliable, he said.Building its products around open industry standards, in particular the security tools, is crucial to allowing third party developers to take advantage of the features, Juniper executives repeatedly stressed at Juniper's Global Enterprise 2008 event held in New York on Tuesday.Officials from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle took the stage to endorse the networking company's ability to foster stronger ties with their own products.Businesses applaud Juniper's move Calvin Choe, director of technical business development for the Enterprise Networking Group at Microsoft, highlighted the importance of Juniper's work to allow for tight integration between its infrastructure technologies and Microsoft's NAP (Network Access Protection) iteration of NAC, which will arrive next month with the introduction of the software giant's Windows Server 2008 software. NAP is also supported in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. "Used with NAP, this will allow network administrators to create policies around identity and assess users' state of compliance to enforce their own set of criteria," said Choe. "The support of standards is important because we wanted to make sure that customers had their choice of switching vendors."In addition to partners, Juniper also hosted several customers on stage, all of whom mentioned the EX-Series' security features as one of the core strengths of the new product line. "Security is one of the most important things to us, and we wanted an extra layer of access control to deliver defense-in-depth," said Frank Ziegler vice president of communications for the Philadelphia Stock Exchange.Some industry watchers said that the new EX-Series switches add a crucial piece that had been missing from Juniper's product portfolio from an integrated security standpoint. The new hardware should help the company differentiate from its rivals, including Cisco -- which has aggressively added to its own security holdings over the last several years, said David Willis, a communications market analyst for Gartner. "I think one of the more interesting elements of the launch is Juniper's work to integrate with third parties like Oracle; Cisco has announced similar intentions to do so, but it may take them years to get products ready -- and the size of Cisco's installed base may actually represent a problem in terms of getting products to market," said Willis. "With Cisco, it's also not unusual to run into customers who may have as many as 50 different versions of its OS on its devices, and from that standpoint, sometimes nothing beats a fresh start."The analyst that just said how much of an advantage the new products could represent on the enterprise market will likely depend on how seriously customers view Juniper's efforts to truly embed security throughout its networking gear versus merely adding individual features.Other experts said that the addition of the switches' security features could threaten providers of standalone devices, such as inline NAC appliance vendors like ConSentry and Autonomic Networks."Clearly the fact that Juniper hasn't had a switching product in this space has limited the reach of UAC, but with customers that have existing investments in Juniper firewalls and VPNs, this could be seen as good news," said Paul Roberts, analyst with The 451 Group. "There's always the question if anyone is really going to do a rip and replace to get NAC functionality, but for companies doing upgrades and looking for the features, this could be a viable option," he said. "In some ways, the new switches may give Juniper the ability to leapfrog Cisco, Extreme Networks, and other rivals with some of these features for access control and applications visibility."
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Former Cisco executive Mike Volpi is reportedly headed to Joost to be the online video company's next CEO.
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TechWeb - From snazzy wireless e-mail solutions to jazzy camera phones, Tis The Season for gee-whiz tools and toys.
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One of India&#39;s leading telecommunications providers will use Cisco Systems&#39; gear to build its new Ethernet-based broadband network.
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A US team develops software to help deaf people use video to chat via sign language over mobile networks.
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Cisco Systems Inc., the world&#39;s largest maker of computer-networking equipment, formed an alliance with Fujitsu Ltd. to increase sales to Japanese telephone carriers.
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They're perhaps not the first name you think of in consumer electronics, but Cisco Systems has plans for that segment of the market.
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Cisco&#39;s Irvine-based Linksys division has announced new relationships with a number of other companies. Linksys said that it has signed an agreement with Verizon to include the company&#39;s VoIP phones in its services.
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Avaya (Quote, Chart), a communications software, systems and services company, has announced a new Internet Protocol-based video-conferencing offering for businesses.
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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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Cisco is integrating its VFrame Data Center with the VMware Virtual Infrastructure provisioning system.
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Cisco Systems Inc. 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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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems, the biggest vendor in IP (Internet Protocol) networking, is diversifying into social networking. The router pioneer has agreed to acquire Five Across, a social-networking software company in San Francisco. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced late Thursday in California, were not disclosed. Cisco expects the deal to close in its fiscal third quarter, which ends April 28. Cisco doesn't plan to set up its own social-networking site to compete against News Corp.'s MySpace or Facebook. Instead, it will use Five Across technology to create software that will help enterprises better connect with their customers. In addition, service providers may be able to build services with the technology and sell them to their business customers, Cisco said. Five Across sells a software platform called Connect Community Builder. It includes a variety of features that enterprises can build into their Web presence for their customers, such as individual profile pages, friend lists, discussions, and posting of blogs, videos and podcasts. The company, founded in 2003, has just 11 employees, according to Cisco. Last year NHL Enterprises L.P.'s National Hockey League launched a site for hockey fans, called NHL Connect, using Five Across software. The acquisition is the first by Cisco's recently formed Media Solutions Group and part of Cisco's expansion into both the consumer and media categories. One target market for the Five Across technology will be entertainment and broadcasting companies such as The Walt Disney Co. and Comcast. But Cisco also expects social networking, like other consumer tools such as instant messaging, to be embraced by general enterprises. Consumers are now demanding social networking capabilities and want to see them on companies' Web sites, according to Cisco. Traditional media providers are ripe for using social networking, said IDC consumer analyst Danielle Levitas. "There's quite a bit of need for experimentation from [traditional] media companies to show their stockholders they can take advantage of the Web and they're not going to cede it to new media companies," Levitas said. A good social-networking component to a media company's Web site could help foster viewer loyalty or even be a place to test new shows among core viewers, she said. Consumer electronics and PC companies could also take advantage of social networking, hosting communities of consumers to share tips and advice, augmenting their technical support offerings, Levitas said. Meanwhile, social networking, with its constant conversations and user-generated content, is also good for Cisco's core business of selling network infrastructure, Levitas said. "Web-based content is incredibly bit-heavy," Levitas said. Social networking brings end users into the game so there is a lot of data coming upstream from the edge of the network as well as downstream from the company.
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Can Ned Hooper keep the magic of Cisco's acquisition machine alive? A lot depends on the answer to that question.
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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.