Cisco focuses on video, innovation teams
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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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(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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Partners with Institution of Engineering and Technology Networking giant Cisco Systems has teamed up with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in the hope of luring young whipper snappers away from the clutches of Media Studies and into the loving arms of the IT profession.â¦
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NEW YORK -- Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday will introduce new products aimed at protecting and expanding one of its biggest sources of revenue - computer-networking equipment for small businesses and branch offices.
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Cisco Systems Inc. executives hinted at major changes in the company&#39;s consumer strategy on Wednesday even as they voiced optimism about networking and the world economy.
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Acquisition is expected to help Cisco Systems reinforce its network management offerings.
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By Amy Thomson  John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco Systems, said Thursday that he planned to remain in the top job for two to five more years to help with the company's transition to video-based conferencing and networking products.
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The company's latest digital camera includes advanced video features.
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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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By Shyla Sangaran  IN today's fast-moving business environment, information and communications technology is playing an increasingly important role. For Cisco Systems, this is reflected in the way its staff take advantage of innovative technologies to communicate and work more effectively.
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Cisco Systems will open a Tokyo-based research and development center focusing on Internet software and routing technologies in February 2005, the company said in a statement last Thursday.
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Cisco and IBM said they are working together to improve systems management for network carriers by combing Tivoli management software with Cisco's Active Network Abstraction technology.
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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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Cisco's new digital media system -- unveiled this week -- is already winning praise from one early adopter, a university in London that is using it to provide students with access to rich media.
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For government agencies and their employees hoping to work remotely in order to meet congressionally mandated targets, a new survey of federal information technology decision makers commissioned by Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has some encouraging news.
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Networking giant looks to find the old magic by boosting the software smarts of its gear.
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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.