Cisco

Strong opinions on Cisco's AON launch

Cisco's new AON business unit has tech companies of all stripes on alert. That's not surprising given that Cisco is proposing that tasks usually handled by middleware or XML acceleration appliances be done in Cisco's own routers.

As Loosely Coupled blogger Phil Wainewright points out, the full significance of Cisco's AON launch is still being digested.

"Despite the lack of buzz and advance fanfare surrounding AON's debut, a swathe of vendors and their customers in the SOA (service-oriented architecture) market will be watching very, very closely," Wainewright writes.

On Tuesday at its Networkers … Read more

Cisco scores with IP Telephony

Cisco's IP telephony business came in big for the company in the third fiscal quarter of 2005, as traditional Ethernet switching seemed to lag.

In fact the IP telephony market generated more than $250 million in revenue this past quarter for the first time ever, CEO John Chambers said during the conference call. This is the second technology area in Cisco's Advanced Technology group to hit this milestone. The first was the security group, which generated over $250 million for the first time last year.

Charles Giancarlo, the company's CTO, said in an interview after the call … Read more

Cisco just barely beats expectations

No big surprises from Cisco Systems, the biggest networking vendor in the world, as it reports earnings on Tuesday.

The company reported results slightly above Wall Street expectations and inline with its own growth projections. Cisco made 23 cents a share on sales of $6.19 billion during the quarter. Analysts had expected the company to make a profit of 22 cents a share on sales of $6.16 billion.

Cisco's stock has languished for the past several quarters as some folks wonder how much growth is left in the networking behemoth.

Analysts and investors will be listening closely … Read more

Cisco code theft part of larger plot

Last year's theft of routing code from Cisco Systems was part of a larger plot involving several of the nation's supercomputers, U.S. universities, research laboratories, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. military, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The break-in at Cisco was discovered last May when security specialists from the supercomputer laboratories investigating the break-in there noticed that Cisco's network was being compromised, said the NY Times article. Even though Cisco officials were notified right away, it was too late. The software code for Cisco's routers had already been … Read more

Cisco serves up $250 million for Topspin

Networking giant Cisco Systems is getting a grip on the clustering racket with an agreement to buy Topspin Communications.

Privately held Topspin makes "server fabric switches" designed to provide high-performance networking service in areas such as grid computing, clustered applications and server virtualization. One of the start-up's customers is Dell, which uses Topspin's switches to connect PowerEdge servers in clusters of up to 128 servers.

Cisco says the $250 million acquisition will help round out its lineup, with Topspin's InfiniBand-based gear falling into place alongside Cisco's Ethernet and SAN switches.