Cisco's CEO: Telecom was never dead.
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Blog: Cisco CEO John Chambers takes issue with a recent Businessweek story that claims the telecom industry has been resurrected from the dead, saying instead that the market is simply entering the next phase of develoment
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Motorola's head of corporate development and strategy tells CNET News.com that the company doesn't want to lose its handset business.
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CANNES, FRANCEÂ -- There was one question on the minds of technology leaders attending the Etre conference in Cannes on Tuesday: 'Is telecom dead?'
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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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Italyâs infrastructure minister indicated Monday that he would not block Spanish acquisition of a large stake in Telecom Italia.
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BEIJING -- John Chambers, the chief executive officer (CEO) and president of Cisco Systems Inc., doesn't care when economists think China is going to become the world's largest economy. He's just thinking about what needs to be done for Cisco to tap into that market.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Just days after Cisco System
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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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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.
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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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DALLAS, Sept. 11  /PRNewswire/ -- Though there has been a large amount of chatter on the subject of storing VoIP information, no telecommunications company has actually done it.  Until now.
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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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Cisco said that its IP Phone allows unconstrained Gigabit Ethernet-enabled bandwidth from the network to desktop phone. Cisco&#39;s Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32 has been enhanced to allow customers to enable
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Company knows it isn't Cisco, but that's no reason it can't compete, says analyst Jon Oltsik.
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(InfoWorld) - John Chambers, Cisco Systems' president and chief executive officer, would partner with Chinese rival Huawei TechnologiesÂ if the opportunity ever arose. "I would love to partner with Huawei," Chambers told reporters during a news conference at the Telecom World 2006 conference and exhibition organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Hong Kong. "That may or may not happen in the future," he said. Huawei is based in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, and has built a growing business on sales of telecommunications and networking gear. In addition to providing equipment to operators in China and in developing nations, Huawei has won significant deals from operators in Europe. In 2005, the company signed contracts worth $8.2 billion, of which 58 percent came from outside China. Relations between Cisco and Huawei have not always been warm. In 2003,Â Cisco sued HuaweiÂ for allegedly copying its IOS software. Cisco dropped that suit in 2004 after Huawei agreed to make changes to its software source code and user manuals. In recent years, Huawei has entered into several partnerships with multinational networking and telecommunication vendors, but these deals have not generally lasted very long. For example, a partnershipÂ agreement between Huawei and Nortel NetworksÂ announced in February never even got off the ground. Within four months, the two companies abandoned their plans to jointly develop broadband products. AÂ joint venture between Huawei and 3ComÂ also did not last. Established in 2003, Huawei-3Com Co. paired Huawei's enterprise networking unit with 3Com's financial backing. Under a deal announced last month, 3Com plans to buy out Huawei's remaining stake in the company, which sold 2 million routers and switches last year and employs about 5,000. Chambers said Cisco has a partnership in several areas with ZTE, another Chinese telecommunication equipment vendor that has looked to expand beyond its home market into new markets overseas. Telecom World runs through Friday. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Yet another communications-infrastructure player reports promising results.
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The controversial plan to create a  Canadian telecom "champion" by merging Telus Corp.  with  market leader BCE Inc.  would not choke competition and  require a sale of either company's lucrative wireless network,  Telus's chief executive said on Thursday.