Cisco's CEO on Hollywood's Walk of Fame?
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There's a star in Hollywood for John Chambers, but not the one you know.
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LOS ANGELES - Godzilla received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday, 50 years after he stomped onto movie screens and hours before the premiere of his latest film, &quot;Godzilla: Final Wars.
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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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Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today participation in the following upcoming events with the financial community, for the month of June, all of which will be webcast. Interested parties can view these events on Cisco's Web site at http://www.cisco.com/go/investors.
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Apple today announced that Andrea Jung, the chairman and chief executive officer of Avon Products, has been elected to Appleâs board of directors. âAndrea is a strong CEO and marketer and we look forward to benefiting from her insights and experience as a member of Appleâs board,â said Steve Jobs, Appleâs CEO.
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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.
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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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September 23, 2004 Beijing -- Cisco Systems&#39; president and CEO John Chambers today announced the company&#39;s intent to open a research and development center in Shanghai, China.
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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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Jaymie Scotto & Associates (JS&A), a marketing and public relations firm  for the for the technology sector, announces Cisco, the worldwide leader  in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and  collaborate, as its top pick for the JS&A Top EXPO Marketing Award.
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Internet television service Joost  named former Cisco senior executive Mike Volpi as its new chief  executive on Tuesday, choosing a telecoms veteran to lead the  company as it courts big media to show programming on its site.
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Cisco Systems made its biggest foray yet into the entertainment and social networking world by announcing plans for the Cisco Entertainment Operating System.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers Wednesday stoked the networking vendor's love affair with IT investors by pointing to the company's unified communications strategy and broad product portfolio as a way to sustain growth over the long term. At the company'sÂ annual financial analyst conference in New York, executives said Cisco will sustain double-digit growth through the rest of the decade by incorporating data, voice, video and mobile capabilities -- what it calls its "quad play" -- across product lines, while addressing the service provider, enterprise, commercial and consumer markets. "Now if youâre the innovator and the leader it protects you from the startups and the advanced players," Chambers said. Cisco expects to sustain a 10 percent to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth rate through the rest of the decade. The company will be able to take advantage of the breakdown of barriers among vertical-market product lines, as consumers and professionals increasingly expect to get both corporate data and home and family information anytime, anywhere, Chambers said. "The network becomes the platform," noted Chambers, in a frequently repeated phrase during the event. At the corporate level, product integration is fueled by a trend in businesses to move from a "command control" style of management to a more collaborative model, he said. "If you asked me a few years ago I would have said collaboration could account for maybe 10 percent to 20 percent productivity efficiency but now I would say that's closer to 30 percent to 40 percent," he said. The company is banking on business uptake of video collaboration tools to boost network traffic and the need for new infrastructure. The quad play equipment and services Cisco offers will be taken up broadly, by smaller commercial companies as well as Fortune 500 businesses, Chambers said. As an example, he pointed out that a 12-store Subway food chain in Texas has already implemented a quad-play Cisco-based system, which uses video to reduce theft. Cisco can also help companies innovate and transition to new technologies, noted Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer. Giancarlo said Cisco "reinvented the TDM PBX [time division multiplex public branch exchange] industry ... bringing it into the unified communications era" through VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) gateways and other products and services. The big question for attendees was whether Cisco can sustain growth and product leadership. The company has had 21 straight quarters where it met or exceeded Thomson Financial analyst consensus expectations, noted Chief Financial Officer Dennis Powell. The company's share price has benefited, surging by about 25 percent over the last year, compared to about 5 percent growth for the Nasdaq exchange. Powell forecast 19 percent to 21 percent growth for the quarter ending this October (including revenue from recent acquisitions), about even with Thomson Financial expectations for the first fiscal quarter, of 20.4 percent revenue growth. Conference attendees noted that so far the company has been able to deliver on its promise to expand into new markets from its traditional corporate switching and router base. One institutional investor who declined to be named noted the company has placed its Carrier Routing System-1 carrier-class product into some 60 companies. 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. For example, Powell indicated that the company would offer a dividend to investors, one sign that the company is confident of its growth predictions, noted 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 will introduce next year its Entertainment Operating System (EOS), a platform for delivering multimedia content to online communities.EOS will be the first major product of&#160;Cisco&#39;s push into helping media companies connect with their customers. It will combine a delivery system, a social networking platform, and a set of tools to help consumers find the content they want, said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco&#39;s media solutions group. It will go on sale in 2008, he said.Two online fan communities, run by the National Hockey League and the NASCAR auto-racing organization, are using elements of EOS today, Scheinman said. NHL Connect, launched last year and uses technology from&#160;social networking company Five Across, which Cisco acquired&#160;in February.Content providers like the sports leagues have large and loyal fan bases but don&#39;t know how to enrich the fan experience or get them to spend more time on their sites, he said. EOS will be a standardized solution for doing that.Making online communities stronger benefits both consumers and content providers, according to Scheinman: Fans get to know each other and providers learn more about their visitors. On top of that, more visits can mean more revenue. Sites such as the NHL&#39;s and NASCAR&#39;s have found that providing legitimate video content leads to more user-generated content as visitors comment on the videos. As they do, visits go up by three to five times, which means three to five times as many opportunities to advertise to the community, he said.EOS will help visitors find content through a recommendation and relevance engine that looks at a user&#39;s activity patterns and makes personalized suggestions, Scheinman said.The growing flood of information available online begs for this type of approach because users often don&#39;t even know what they&#39;re looking for, he said.&quot;Finding anything in this world of infinite information out there is really going to be tricky,&quot; Scheinman said. &quot;You want to be able to have content find you.&quot;Cisco&#39;s network expertise and&#160;recent social-networking acquisitions uniquely equip it to solve this set of problems, he said.&quot;We&#39;ve become the only company that can do all of these three things together,&quot; Scheinman said.
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HIMSS 2007 -- Cisco(R) (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced the formation of the Community for Connected Health, a Cisco-sponsored forum dedicated to sharing best-practices for using information to drive better healthcare.
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LOS ANGELES Without Michael Eisner at the helm of Walt Disney, will Harvey Weinstein and Steve Jobs stay as partners? That is the question on the minds of analysts and Hollywood executives after Eisner, the
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Actor Tim Allen received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday and declared it just the beginning of major neighborhood improvements. "Stop traffic! All these buildings will be named after me!" the former "Home Improvement" star joked during a ceremony marking the honor.