Cisco Systems

In the battle for supremacy among the software industry's Big Four, Cisco may be placing the biggest bets and angling for the biggest returns. Some still think of Cisco as a networking hardware vendor, but hardware is simply Cisco's beachhead into others' turf, similar to how Microsoft (desktop), Oracle (database), and IBM (everything) are using core strengths to move into adjacent markets.

If anyone needed further confirmation of Cisco's software aspirations, its forays into Linux offer a strong hint.

In what might have looked like a publicity stunt around a $100,000 prize for Linux developers, Cisco'… Read more

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.

Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?

Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."

Cisco gets this. At least, groups within … Read more

Eating dinner with Larry Augustin in London this weekend, we fell to talking about open source's relevance to the SMB (small- and medium-sized business) market. Augustin is currently CEO of SugarCRM, a company with over 5,000 customers, many of them SMBs.

But SugarCRM is the exception to the rule. Open source has long been billed as a savior for the SMB market, but the reality is that open-source adoption has largely been an enterprise IT phenomenon, despite other exceptions like KnowledgeTree, which recently updated its product suite to further appeal to this market.

Why aren't more SMBs … Read more

In December 2008, Cisco decided to pay developers to stick a finger in the Microsoft eye with a $100,000 bounty for writing Linux-based applications for its AXP (Application Extension Platform) and Integrated Services Routers (ISRs). Nine hundred registrations and 75 countries later, Cisco has announced its 10 finalists.

What's intriguing about the contest is the diversity of the participants, most of whom are individuals, though there are a few two- or three-person teams. The finalists hail from North (three) and South (two) America, Europe (three), and Asia (two).

Perhaps this diversity lends itself to explaining why the applications … Read more

By just about any measure, Red Hat dominates its open-source competition and holds its own with big proprietary peers like Oracle and Microsoft, as this Wolfram Alpha analysis suggests. Though far smaller than Oracle and Microsoft, it continues to outpace rivals in year-to-date returns on its stock, among other things.

But where does Red Hat go from here? Or, more pertinently, where does it grow from here?

Red Hat's open-source business model has proved financially sound, but it's unclear that it applies beyond complex infrastructure software like operating systems and application servers. Red Hat's own CTO, Brian … Read more

Stephen Fry, British author and host of a book/BBC series on his travels in the United States, offers up a paean to America in the May 9 edition of The Spectator. At times lightly scabrous, often hilarious, Fry gives a depiction of America that sounds much like Silicon Valley today:

[With some not insignificant exceptions]...America is comprised of the descendants of men and women who at some point over the last 300 years or so wanted to improve their lives. They left their miserable shtetls and peasant hovels and urban slums and blighted potato fields and sailed the … Read more

My post on Tuesday suggesting that Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft are the last remaining big (software) ecosystem vendors caused a stir. "But what about EMC, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Adobe Systems, Symantec, and...X?" came the flustered responses.

HP's public-relations firm even took the time to send me this plug for HP's software business:

IT management software is critical for enterprises to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. As the leading IT management software vendor (according to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), HP's software solutions helps customers manage IT … Read more

Enterprise software is coming down to four big choices: Cisco Systems or IBM or Oracle or Microsoft.

Hewlett-Packard? HP is doing very well in hardware, but it lacks the overarching software strategy that fuels these other four.

Even as the industry consolidates into these big ecosystem vendors, it's becoming ripe for a new kind of hegemonic, all-out war.

It's a fun time to be in the industry. For one thing, it's fascinating to watch (and, in some cases, assist) each of the Big Four to use open source as a strategic club with which to pummel their … Read more

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the legal tussle between Apple and the Mac cloner, Psystar.

This week, Psystar sued Apple on antitrust grounds. Psystar execs said they just want to make the Mac OS "more accessible" by offering it on cheaper hardware than what Apple provides. It's hard not to imagine Apple fighting this one to the bitter end and Psystar getting crushed in a lengthy litigation.

Another battle is brewing with Cisco Systems adding e-mail and calendaring to its on-demand, collaborative software platform with the acquisition of PostPath. … Read more