I have operated in the networking space for over 10 years now and I have never seen a company that even gets close to Cisco for attempting innovation, holding onto client mind share and developing long term, strategic partnerships.

Re: Where's David?

These guys are the kings of spin. They have created some great solutions along the way. Their routing and switching platforms can be trusted. They may not have the best product, but as an all round business they are hard to beat. Competitors have come and gone. Nortel killed Bay's challenge as soon as they bought it. 3Com decided that although they owned substantial market share in the corporate mid market and public sector space that it was time to exit that market. Oh what could have been! Extreme and Foundry have stunning products in certain spaces, but are companies run by technologists.

In my mind there are only two companies who could even get close to attacking Cisco's corporate dominance (I see HP's strength in the mid market and below) and that is Nortel and Juniper. Nortel's switches and routers remain capable but they will lead strongly via their hyperconnectivity message and their partnership with Microsoft, leveraging big wins in the unified comms space to reposition their infrastructure technology in major Cisco accounts. Juniper have the technology lead but have, so far, remained at the perimeter of the enterprise infrastructure market, creating in roads in the overall enterprise market though solid acquisitions of companies such as NetScreen and Peribit. We have yet to see what their next step is, but if their strength of vision & execution matches their technological capability I can only see good things for them in 2008.