61 CCIEs dropped out of Cisco's highly coveted cert program over the last 30 days

According to Dual CCIE #18532 R&S/Security - George Morton:

"Over the last 30 days we have seen CCIEs drop their highly coveted certifications at a much greater rate than net new CCIEs.

"61 CCIEs dropped out of Cisco's prestigious certification program during the month of January 2010 alone.

"For further clarification, let's do the math together:

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Cisco IP phones praised in email to then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and First Dude, Todd Palin

In collaboration with MSNBC.com, Crivella West Incorporated - a knowledge discovery company, digitized, analyzed and arranged this e-mail collection of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, First Dude Todd Palin and 7 members of Palin's staff.

In the following internal email dated May 7, 2007 addressed to then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (email address: govpalin@gov.state.ak.us) and First Dude Todd Palin (email address: fek9wnr@yahoo.com), Erika Fagerstrom - Executive Residence Manager & Assistant to the First Gentleman Alaska Governor's House, praised the installation of new Cisco IP Phones in the Alaska Governor's Mansion:

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New markets for Cisco not generating revenue, Chambers says

I've got to admit that I've been "kind of harsh" when blogging about Cisco CEO John Chambers lately.

So thought I'd loosen up this time and blog about interesting statements made by Chambers.

Racking my brain, I kept thinking about John Chambers and his duck quacking!

How in the heck could I find something as interesting as that to blog about?

Well, I think I've found it.

Interesting statements (at least in my opinion) made by John Chambers during Cisco's earnings call.

Listening to the Cisco earnings conference call over the phone, I thought for sure that the following quotes were very interesting statements made by Chambers, you be the judge on just how interesting they are:

Interesting Statement Number 1:

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Cisco's F2Q10 accounts receivable soar $1.34 billion year over year!

Source: Cisco Systems

It's my personal opinion, that it's always a "Red Flag" when a company's accounts receivable increases year over year (YOY) at a higher dollar amount than the (YOY) increase in a company's net sales.

So that's why when Cisco reported a F2Q10 accounts receivable (YOY) increase ($1.344 billion) that was a whopping $618 million more than Cisco's (YOY) net sales increase ($726 million), alarm bells began ringing in my mind.

7 Year Comparison of Cisco's 2nd Quarter Financial Numbers (In Millions)

Source: United States Securities and Exchange Commission

During Cisco's F2Q10 earnings conference call, Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni discussed Cisco's accounts receivable numbers:

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Cisco joins growing laundry list of entities paying Melissa Hathaway to be senior security advisor

Tomorrow at 2:00 PM Pacific Time, Cisco will officially announce paying Melissa Hathaway (best known for authoring the Obama White House treatise - Cyberspace Policy Review), to be a senior adviser to its security team.

Hathaway appears to be cashing in on her government contacts.

View the growing laundry list of entities paying Hathaway to be a senior security advisor:

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Turmoil at Vyatta as Cisco prepares to announce its Q2FY10 earnings?

Earlier today, the bio and photo of Dave Roberts - the Vice President of Marketing for open source networking vendor - Vyatta, was still featured on its website (now it's gone).

So what happened in the space of a mere few hours?

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Brocade BCNE most valuable cert on earth

Scrappy data center networking vendor - Brocade, appears to be offering networking gurus the most valuable cert on earth, the Brocade Certified Network Engineer (BCNE) at $146,250, at least according to the average salary rankings of the 2009 Certification Magazine Salary Survey.

Cashing in on the big bucks further, Brocade can also lay claim to the 3rd most valuable cert - the Brocade Certified SAN Manager (BCSM) at $136,020.

Amazingly, Brocade then follows thru with an even more devastating uppercut knockout punch by claiming the 4th most valuable cert too - the Brocade Certified Fabric Designer (BCFD) at $134,100.

In an unprecedented carnage over the last 2 months, Cisco's worldwide CCIE R&S count has fallen by -110, which might help explain why Cisco’s Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE R&S) was only ranked 10th at $120,130.

The average salary for a Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate – Enterprise Routing (JNCIA-ER) is only $95,980:

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Pineapple ratings get dished out to Cisco blogs that rock for 2010

This month, the Thinking problem management! blog dished out its famous pineapple ratings:

Blogs and stuff that rock - Early 2010 edition

According to the Thinking blog, its pineapple ratings are reliant on the non-scientific scavenging of the Meerkats and the attitude of the cobras.

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Avian Securities reiterates its negative opinion about Juniper Networks

This Thursday, January 28, Juniper Networks will be webcasting its Q4 2009 earnings conference call. However today, Wall Street telecom diva Catharine Trebnick - Sr. Research Analyst at Avian Securities, reiterated her "negative opinion" about Juniper:

"We expect JNPR to report revenue and EPS in-line to high end of management guidance, slightly above our estimates of $883.7M/$0.25 (Street=$884M/$0.25, Guidance of $860M-$895M/$0.23-$0.26). We believe the company saw a step-up in demand in North America operator segment from Comcast and AT&T. Our reseller discussions indicate enterprise strong demand for SRX and EX products in particular."

Regarding Juniper's 4Q09 results:

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Riverbed expected to maintain its WAN optimization market share

On Tuesday, Feb. 2, WAN optimization vendor - Riverbed Technology will release its 4th quarter and fiscal year 2009 financial results. In his research note today, my favorite Wall Street tea-leaf reader - RBC Capital Markets Managing Director - Mark Sue, gave his take on what investors should expect from Riverbed's upcoming financial results:

"The WAN optimization market may rebound in 2010 and we expect Riverbed to maintain its market share. We're looking for additional specifics as they relate to Riverbed's ability to address the public & private cloud networking opportunity. Gross margins were guided to decline to 76% from 78.1%, but we don't believe the slide may be that dramatic as product and channel mix recovers. We expect Riverbed to calibrate its OM guidance for CY10 in the low to mid 20s (22% recently), yet we note that, similar to most companies, Riverbed has started to hire again. Another thing to look for is the sequential growth in inventories, which grew 32% QoQ in the prior quarter to $12.1M.

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Cisco appears to have missed the newest market transition: Don't be evil

Earlier this week Cisco announced it would further embrace China, then the very next day, heroically and gallantly in my opinion, Google announced it would fight cyber attacks that originated in China by potentially closing its operations there, while also refusing in the future to censor its search results that had long been mandated by China.

Finally today in Forbes, Cisco (the largest information security vendor to corporate enterprises in the U.S.), made a comment that appears to address Google's battle with China:

"We are closely following recent industry discussions regarding censorship in China. But as Cisco is not a service or content provider and doesn't participate in the censorship of information by any government, we cannot comment regarding the specific cases of any of our industry peers."

Cisco's statement above is curious based on this transcript - page 2 (page 8 of the PDF) from a U.S. Congressional Hearing held on February 15, 2006:

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Cyber attacks: Cisco appears to embrace China while Google fights China

This week Cisco appeared to embrace China.

Jan. 11, 2010:

"Given the size and growth of the Chinese economy and our significant commitments to our China business, we believe designating Greater China as its own theater marks an important next step in our strategy."

While Google chose to fight China:

Jan. 12, 2010:

"In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different. First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

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Cisco CCIE R&S count plummets -110

Last month, Dual CCIE #18532 R&S/Security - George Morton seemed flabbergasted to report that Cisco's CCIE R&S count had fallen by -48 for the first time since 2000. Amazingly, Morton is now reporting that the carnage among the worldwide CCIE R&S count has accelerated even further this month by plummeting an astonishing -62, bringing the total loss among the worlwide CCIE R&S count to -110, and all of this in only a short two month time span that additionally according to Morton:

"The new news is that the total number of R&S CCIEs declined over the last month by -62.

"That's big.

"Especially when you consider that the most popular CCIE track is R&S, candidates still passed the R&S Lab over the last 30 days, however, the older CCIEs just aren't recertifying. By not recertifying, those older R&S CCIEs are being dropped from the active rolls and that speaks more about the state of the Cisco VAR program than it does to the state of the CCIE universe.

"All Cisco Gold and Silver Partners need CCIEs and those CCIEs must be active CCIEs in good standing with Cisco, (meaning they've passed the Written Test + passed the Lab Exam + they must pass the Written Test every two years to recertify). Because the count's going down, I suspect we're seeing more CCIEs retire from Cisco and the VAR channel or they're just not doing work where having an active CCIE number is important. The end result is fewer CCIEs supporting new Cisco equipment sales (view CCIEs are bringing home the bacon for Cisco) and instead CCIEs will now support the currently installed Cisco equipment base.

"The rest of the news is the same, Asia is in decline, Security CCIEs continue to remain flat to down, and Service Provider is the future number #2 in total certifications. I still want to know what's going on in Egypt, because every report now has Egypt ranked in the top ten count for new CCIEs."

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Will Cisco gear become search engine toll collectors?

Cisco has filed a patent application on a method that seeds search engine crawlers using intercepted network traffic. Cisco's method includes monitoring data packets exchanged in a computer network over which documents having respective location identifiers are distributed, so as to detect a request to access a given document. A location identifier of the given document is extracted from the request. The location identifier is provided to a search engine that searches for data in a set of the documents, so as to cause the search engine to add the given document to the set.

I'm wondering whether Cisco has cleverly found a way for its gear to become search engine toll collectors. For example, Cisco's patent application specifically states:

Although the embodiments described herein mainly address seeding of web-crawling search engines, the principles of the present invention can also be used for additional applications, such as for controlling the re-crawl frequency for a given Web page. It will thus be appreciated that the embodiments described above are cited by way of example, and that the present invention is not limited to what has been particularly shown and described hereinabove. Rather, the scope of the present invention includes both combinations and sub-combinations of the various features described hereinabove, as well as variations and modifications thereof which would occur to persons skilled in the art upon reading the foregoing description and which are not disclosed in the prior art.

Fig 1

A block diagram that schematically illustrates a system for searching for data in a computer network:

FIG. 1 is a block diagram that schematically illustrates a system 20 for searching in a computer network 24, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. Network 24 may comprise, for example, a Wide-Area Network (WAN) such as the Internet, a Metropolitan-Area Network (MAN), a Local-Area Network (LAN) or a combination of such network types. Network 24 may comprise a public network or an enterprise network (sometimes referred to as an Intranet). Additionally or alternatively, network 24 may comprise any other suitable network type. The network typically comprises a packet-switched network, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) network.

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Terry Eger was the Cisco executive who hired John Chambers

A year ago I blogged:

The mystery of the missing video of Cisco co-founders Bosack and Lerner discussing their termination

Fascinatingly this week (at least in my opinion), Kirk Lougheed - who is an original member of Cisco's founding team and a current Cisco Fellow, detailed Cisco's history in the video below.

So what caught my attention?

Well, at the 3:50 time mark, Lougheed spoke admiringly about Terry Eger - Cisco's former vice president of sales, but he didn't mention the fact that it was Eger who was actually responsible for the hiring of John Chambers:

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How to absolutely guarantee QoS with network traffic

Below, network performance measuring vendor - Plixer International, gives the Cisco Subnet its How-To Tutorial on guaranteeing QOS with network traffic:

"As timely transmission of data across the network becomes increasingly important, so too does the science of QoS. How do we know for sure that millisecond sensitive packets are getting the priority we want them to receive as they traverse the IT infrastructure?"

Cisco DiffServ to the rescue?

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John Chambers: Big is back... Cisco is the example

Earlier this month, Cisco CEO John Chambers pontificated to a gathering of financial analysts:

"Big is back... Cisco is the example. The only criticism of Cisco now is a question of are we too innovative... And that's where we want to be."

Do you agree with John Chambers that big is back and Cisco's the example?

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Harvard Business Review: John Chambers trumps Steve Jobs in market cap change

In a ranking of 1,999 CEOs from 1,205 companies, the Harvard Business Review has John Chambers ahead of Steve Jobs in market capitalization change by $2 billion:

Market capitalization change:

"We measured the change in equity market capitalization over the CEO’s entire tenure. We adjusted this measure for inflation in each country and translated values into U.S. dollars, using 2006 exchange rates. We added to this figure the inflation- and currency-adjusted value of the dividends and shares repurchased, and subtracted the adjusted value of shares issued."

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According to a Cisco CTO, the $43B network plans of a large Cisco customer not in best national interest of Australia

Australia appears to be in a tizzy over comments made last week by Cisco's Australian CTO - Kevin Bloch.

According to the Australian press, "Networking experts have discussed concerns that the national broadband network will put the nation on a $43 billion path 'back to the future' by returning incumbent telcos to dominant market positions. Cisco Australia chief technology officer Kevin Bloch said that the NBN Co's minimalist approach to building the network would place an additional investment burden on access seekers that only dominant market players could bear. Mr Bloch's criticism centred on the NBN Co's choice, revealed early yesterday, to build the network around a standard G-PON (Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network), which lack technical smarts for routing data called 'layer 3' services. While Cisco stood to gain more by selling additional networking equipment to access seekers, Mr Bloch said it was not in the national interest to choose the path NBN Co had chosen."

Listen to the entire audio tape of the comments made by Bloch as well as other members of the panel (whom appeared at Australia's Realising Our Broadband Future conference).

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Widespread component supply shortages may be severe enough to limit Cisco's revenue upside

In his research note today, Matthew Robison - Wedbush Securities' Senior Vice President of Communications Technology Equity Research, remarked:

"Manufacturing and sourcing was not a topic of discussion during last week’s analyst meeting and staff associated with this aspect of the company did not seem to be available at the event. Supply constraints were downplayed when we inquired."

That's interesting in my opinion, because long product lead times and supply chain shortages were discussed and were most certainly an "issue" during Cisco's most recent earnings call, for example:

Cisco F1Q10 (Qtr End 10/24/09) Earnings Call Transcript:

Frank Calderoni - Cisco CFO: "We are seeing some product lead time extensions stemming from supplier constraints based upon labor and other actions taken during the downturn."

John Chambers - Cisco CEO: "In terms of the quarter, we made good progress during the quarter on our lead time issues and we need to bring them down further this next quarter, and it varies by product category."

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