Cisco has again tried to distract the media away from the fun game of speculating on its next acquisition by unleashing a barrage of press releases of internatinal interest. (It’s not working … but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Today, we heard about Norway signing up for Cisco’s IP NGN platform to increase its mobile data services. We heard about Cisco’s launch of its Globalisation Centre East in Bangalore, India, and of its almost spiritual sounding qwest to supply the world with a “holistic blueprint for ‘Intelligent Urbanisation.’ ” (Cisco’s words not ours.) The upshot seems to be that Cisco may be building a broadband network in Bangalore.
The terms of such a deal hinge on a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Cisco and the Incheon Metropolitan City in which Cisco will help Incheon create an environmentally sustainable city. First up, the two are investigating the “legal and technical aspects of this collaboration.” But assuming it’s legal, the two plan to develop what they term as an advanced “u-City” that uses the Internet. Apparently the two will also roll out services “to help citizens experience a technology-enabled lifestyle.” The happy MOU-joined couple promise that they will be launching pilot programs soon. On a more concrete level (pun intended), Cisco will support the city’s Global City Fair and Festival 2009.
In a synchronistic way, the hot story of the day continues to be speculation as to what Cisco is going to do with $30 billion bucks. Notes Peter Burrows from BusinessWeek:
“Once it completes its surprise $4 billion debt offering, networking giant Cisco Systems will have more than $30 billion in the bank. That’s more than Apple at $27 billion and Microsoft at $20 billion, and within sight of Exxon Mobil with $38 billion.”
Burrows offers a less-sexy analysis of why Cisco needed the money, but he didn’t want to stop anyone’s good time in playing the who-should-Cisco-buy game. (Though the same names mixed in with some impossible suspects continue to be trotted out. VMware or EMC has earned the popular vote as the most likely, but names like NetApp, Akamai are cropping up, as is the ridiculous notion of Sun Microsystems.)
But sadly, Burrows points out that the debt offering might be for mere cash flow management, as he says only $3.2 billion of Cisco’s cash is currently in the U.S. and the company needs to cough up $500 million on February 20 to pay off debt related to its 2005 purchase of Scientific Atlanta. To boot, the Senate killed a proposal to let companies repatriate offshore earnings at lower tax rates.
So it is unclear how financially beneficial this holistic, environmentally sustainable, U-city qwest will be for Cisco, but it sure sounds like a lofty agenda.
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