Cisco’s involvement in Saudi Arabia is being reported both in awe and with suspicion. Daniel Turner reporting in BOX Forex describes how a late-arriving Cisco delegation led by Senior VP Paul Mountford traveled at 110 miles per hour to get to a groundbreaking ceremony for the King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia’s showcase tech city. According to Turner, KAEC in 2020 is expected to house 2 million people in a city three times the size of Manhattan using the most hi-tech gizmos. However, a BusinessWeek article about ‘Net censorship in Saudi Arabia discusses how far Cisco is enabling the country to censor, and points to a 250,000-camera surveillance system expected to be deployed in the KAEC, as an example.
Cisco says it will “design every major facet of the [information and communications] systems” for KAEC and two other similar projects elsewhere in the region. In 2006, Cisco announced it would invest $265 million in Saudi Arabia over the next five years, increasing its number of employees in the region nearly 10-fold and more than doubling the number of its network academies in the country.
In a blog posting, BusinessWeek journalist Peter Burrows said he “struggled with how to explain the link, if any, between what Cisco sells and what the Saudi Arabian government does. Cisco has always maintained that it just sells the routers—that what each customer chooses to do with them is their own business. I have a hard time with this explanation, if only because Cisco’s strategy in emerging markets is all about selling the e-services that make those routers useful.”
Burrows also mentions that Cisco was absent in the member list of the Global Network Initiative, a new code of conduct for technology companies, to help “protect and advance individuals’ rights to free expression and privacy on the Internet.” Burrows said he was told by Cisco that the code only applied to Internet service providers, not gear makers, but that the network giant would participate in a comparable effort for hardware providers.
Cisco’s interests in repressed regions were the focus of two shareholder proposals that were both shot down at the company’s recent shareholder meeting. A shareholder John C. Harrington called on Cisco to create a board committee on human rights, while a proposal by Boston Common Asset Management wanted Cisco to publish an Internet fragmentation report. A full 98% voted against the Harrington proposal, while 68% voted against the Boston Common proposal.
It’s a difficult decision for businesses to make. Should they shun doing business with repressed nations, or sell them equipment and not ask how the technology is going to be used. In these economic times, could businesses survive doing the former?
More from Cisco Subnet:* Could E-rate be going away for education?The cold evidence of Cisco’s hiring freezeCisco workers told to rein in holiday spendingNew Cisco ASR 9000 is using an off-the-shelf packet-processing chip7 new 802.1x features for Catalyst 6500Using a Packet Trace to Show TCP Throughput* Under the hood: Cisco unified communicationsAll about VMware virtualizationCisco News and Review podcastJimmy Ray Purser Networking Geek to Geek podcast Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Go to
