Cisco and Juniper are taking their router rivalry to Spain next week as they unveil new and acquired products for wireless operators at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This market will be hotly contested by the two router leaders, and others, as the percentage of IP data traffic from mobile devices explodes. Read more
The majority of enterprises surveyed recently by Infonetics Research have no firm plans to use cloud-based data center services. As a data center investment driver, cloud gets trumped by security, virtualization and an increasing number of gigabit ports. Read more
More shots are being fired at Cisco in the data center. BLADE Network Technologies, perhaps Cisco's closest competitor in data center switching, this week unveiled its Unified Fabric Architecture, which stresses the company's sole focus on the data center and its partnerships with server vendors. Read more
It's almost like clockwork. Once word leaked earlier this week that Cisco is prepping an upgrade to its CRS-1 core router to take it to 120G per slot, Juniper this week said it has a new generation of silicon to take its T series core routers to 250G per slot, full duplex. Read more
The "backdoors" that Cisco and other networking companies implement in their routers and switches for lawful intercept are front and center again at this week's Black Hat security conference. A few years ago, they were cause celebre in some VoIP wiretapping arguments and court rulings. Read more
Cisco is expected to remain aggressive in 2010 as it looks to take back lost market share. The company will build on its generous financing for SMBs, continue to set the industry pace in mergers and acquisitions, and leverage its formidable cash position - greater than $20 billion post- Tandberg and Starent acquisitions - in an effort to pull away from competitors, according to investment firm UBS. Read more
Cisco Press is sponsoring a mega giveaway on Network World’s Cisco Subnet. Read more
Cisco is said to be preparing the launch of its next-generation CRS-1 core router. According to a bulletin from Oppenheimer & Co., Cisco over the next month will unveil the MSC120, a 120Gbps per slot upgrade of the 40Gbps per slot, six-year-old CRS-1. Read more
Juniper's blow out Q4 may portend a stellar quarter from rival Cisco as well. Cisco reports next Tuesday and some analysts expect the company to come in ahead of estimates. Read more
Cisco is now shipping the 160G Ethernet card - 16x10G - it announced last summer for the ASR 9000. Word of this comes as EZchip this week announced that it is now sampling its NP-4 100G Ethernet processor. Read more
One of the reasons Cisco's Unified Computing System may be generating little sales is that customers are divided on whether to replace current HP servers with the platform, or stick with HP. Internal bickering among some Fortune 100 customers may be delaying their UCS deployments, Avian Securities found.
In a bulletin on Cisco's upcoming Q2 results, Avian analyst Catharine Trebnick writes: Read more
90% of IP traffic in 3 years will be video, according to Cisco's Marthin De Beer, senior vp of the company's Emerging Technologies group. It will be 50% of mobile traffic around that time too, he said from Cisco's Networkers conference in Barcelona.
"It will change the way we build, design and configured networks," he told the assembled at the conference. Read more
Cisco today announced that it is revamping its CCNP exam process and also launching a new certification for service providers. Cisco Subnet blogger Wendell Odom has posted more details about the new CCNP exam in his blog. He writes, "Cisco starts by removing roughly half the topic breadth from the old CCNP: most every topic from ONT and ISCW is gone. Cisco then adds back a Troubleshooting exam that focuses on routing and switching with a few other topics. Read more
The timing only made it seem that way. Juniper and Polycom were already hatching their deepened partnership when Cisco announced intentions to acquire Polycom rival Tandberg. Read more
BusinessWeek profiled Cisco's M&A strategy this week and found that for every company Cisco's buys, it's looked at 100. Cisco has 50 people sizing up acquisitions all the time, the story states.
In those 100 evaluations, 10 get to the "serious level of conversation" stage, says Charles Carmel, Cisco's vice president of corporate development, in the story. Only one is chosen, however, for a 1% hit rate. Read more
Cisco this week said it successfully tested a router and its IOS software while it was in orbit in space. Cisco said the test is the first deployment of an IP router aboard a commercial GEO satellite, which was launched Nov. 23, 2009. Read more
Cisco's Unified Computing System is generating a lot of interest but little sales to date, according to a bulletin form Oppenheimer & Co. on Cisco's upcoming quarterly results. In interviews with 30 channel partners in the U.S. and Europe, Oppenheimer found that interest in UCS is strong but that sales are hampered by immaturity and a dearth of applications. Read more
Cisco and HP say their intentions are aligned when it comes to the hairy task of managing growing numbers of switched VMs in data centers. The companies have both submitted proposals to the IEEE on ways to manage the switch management of multiplying VMs moving around. Read more
CNN carried a Dow Jones story today on how some in Congress are calling for other US IT titans to follow Google's lead and review, even perhaps exit the Chinese market - the largest Internet market in terms of number of users. Read more
Colleague Tim Greene this week reports that users of SSL VPNs configured with Cisco's ASA appliance may have limited access to applications through Internet Explorer 8. Read more
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