Cisco in the Hot Seat Addressing Alcatel-Lucent’s Core Network Offering
Service provider core networking has been a very difficult market segment for technology providers to penetrate based on its importance to global service providers and because it requires costly, ongoing innovation and investment to meet ever-changing customer requirements. While many vendors have attempted to enter this market – Avici and Caspian Networks come to mind – most have failed. In fact, Alcatel introduced a product in this space in the 2000s with the 7770. It was unsuccessful and ultimately discontinued.
While Cisco continues to be No. 1 in the core, we are not sitting on our hands by any means. In fact, our innovation engine is in high gear, and we are confident that we’ve got the right strategy to lead our customers into the next decade and beyond. Our architectural approach was designed to enable the best delivery of video and mobility by leveraging the network intersection points of the cloud, network, and client.
I just finished an interview on the topic of “Cloud in Manufacturing” with a German machine-building and factory automation magazine. The interview ran an hour longer than scheduled—an indication of the publication’s interest, as well as its lingering doubts about whether cloud services truly can benefit “real manufacturing.”
We discussed an abundance of cloud-related ideas – most pertaining to obvious areas such as web presence in marketing, after-sales application hosting to make field engineers more productive, and collaboration as a service to enable partners and suppliers to work together more effectively on large projects.
The uncharted cloud territory, however, is the area that manufacturers see their “core”: the physical making of things. Can cloud play a role in supply chain management (yes, it can)? Will there be a cloud service for motion control (due to latency and determinism considerations, not yet) and for asset management and MIS applications (yes)? Read More »
Previously I wrote about how we’d won the “Best Carrier Ethernet Aggregation Product” award with the Cisco ASR 9000 System at Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Amsterdam. This momentum continues on the other side of the globe where Alex Zinin, our Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific theatre recently accepted several awards at the annual Telecom Asia Readers Choice Awards 2011: Read More »
We’ve just formally kicked off our new fiscal year and, last week, we completed our annual global sales meeting where John Chambers, Rob Lloyd, and the Cisco leadership team charged up our sales organization around the Next Cisco.
So what does the Next Cisco mean to our partners?
One message that I want you to hear loud and clear is that partners are, and will continue to be, an integral part of our strategy.
Here in the United States, many kids are beginning a new school year, so I thought I a quick math lesson would help me illustrate the value partners bring and what’s happening here at Cisco.
Watch this short video for my math lesson to help you better understand what’s changing, what’s not, and how Cisco, along with our partners, adds up to success.
Keep reading for more details on my math lesson. Read More »
Following the announcement of the ASR 9000 System last month, it was not too surprising that one of the most popular demos at Cisco Live in Las Vegas was the Service Provider IP NGN pod. For this event we had a setup which included 100GE interfaces connected between an ASR 9000 (edge) and a CRS-3 (core). Ultimately over the course of the show we totaled over one thousand 100GE customer engagements, and nearly 200 ASR 9000 Test Drive (better known as “Robot Arm”) demonstrations.
Capability to support 100GE is something that we see consistently in customer RFPs, even if they intend to deploy 10GE initially. It’s all about investment protection while (in some cases) they wait for the cost of 100G to be more competitive with using multiple 10GE links. Given the cost of 100 Gbps pluggable optics, it’s amazing to hold in your hands something so small and plain that sells for the cost of a luxury car.
Also a hit was the award winning Cisco ASR 9000 Test Drive, about which I’ve blogged before. This of course was physically located in San Jose, and streamed to Cisco Live while being controlled on the show floor by the users. (A true, but little known fact – the inspiration for the Test Drive came from toy heat engine known as the “drinking bird”. We liked the idea that the IOS XR-enabled ASR 9000 keeps running much like a perpetual motion machine).
Previously I wrote about how we’d 
