Cisco facing Challenges in the networking world

Cisco facing Challenges in the networking world

It's widely known that networking giant Cisco has seen stiffening competition over the last year. In a recent webcast, the company worked to assert its dominance. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

A lot of things in the networking world were originally conceived on a best effort basis. There are also a lot of networks built simply to be 'good enough' to meet the current needs of an enterprise.

In a live webcast event this week, networking vendor Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) took aim at the 'good enough' mentality when it comes to networking. Executives from Cisco stressed that the modern demands of video and collaboration cannot be effectively met by the 'good enough' approach.

There is however a catch. While Cisco is an advocate of standards, the company is also an advocate of its own specific technology platforms. Cisco is facing increasing competition from vendors including HP and Juniper. A key point of differentiation for Cisco, as well as other vendors, comes from innovations that aren't necessarily standardized.

Mike Rau, vice-president and CTO of Borderless Networks at Cisco explained that standards while important, aren't enough.

"Standards provide a set of innovations into the marketplace," Rau said. "But most of those innovations start off with an investment from a particular company that then gets integrated into a product portfolio to provide customer benefits."

Rau noted Cisco has been active in many major standards in layer 2 networking, including VLAN and Power over Ethernet, among others. He added that those standards started out as Cisco innovations to enable customers to build out reliable networks and then moved into the standards world.

"Standards-based plus" networking Rau's belief is that when an enterprise managers are looking for a next generation networking vendor, they should look at what the vendor does from a standards basis, as well as what it's doing to provide innovation on top of those standards:

"Standards-based is fine, but standards-based plus is really what you're looking for with large scale, highly-reliable enterprise network deployments," Rau said.

Rau also addressed a question during the webcast about whether or not he thought taking a multi-vendor approach was the right path to build a next generation network.

"One of the benefits that an end-to-end Cisco infrastructure delivers is a large amount of test and integration work that we do," Rau said.

Rau added that an enterprise could do that with multiple vendors, but it would take time to do all the test and integration work. In his view, the benefit of having Cisco end-to-end is a higher level of service.

Rau also address the myth that having a basic level of Quality of Service (QoS) in a network is good enough. With the rise of video demand on networks, QoS requirements have changed.

"There is one thing that is really true about video, throwing bandwidth at video doesn't necessarily solve the problem of doing large scale management and control," Rau said. Part of the challenge with video is how to do you manage it when there is a request for more bandwidth than is available?"

Rau suggested that new QoS services are required to meet next generation video networking needs and good enough isn't good enough for video.

"In addition to QoS, we also have to bring in capabilities to mange control and troubleshoot video," Rau said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Microsoft to buy Skype for $8,5bn

MICROSOFT plans to buy internet phone service Skype for $8,5bn – a rich price – as it seeks to regain ground on growing rivals such as Google.

Microsoft’s bid to gain the world’s most popular internet-calling service and its 663-million customers highlights a need to gain new customers for its Windows and Office software. Skype had considered other options, including tie-ups with Facebook and Google. Such a deal was seen as valuing Skype at up to $4bn.

The $8,5bn price includes net debt, a person familiar with the matter said Skype reported about $775m in debt, along with a revolving credit line of 430m, in a filing in April. Microsoft had cash and short-term investments of about $50bn at the end of March this year.
“This could give Microsoft a much-needed kick-start in telecommunications,” CCS Insight analyst Paolo Pescatore said in London yesterday. In voice services, “Skype has certainly set the benchmark.

A purchase by Microsoft would divert Skype from a planned share sale.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, slipped 1,8% to the equivalent of $25,58 in German trading yesterday. The stock fell 4c, or 0,2%, to $25,83 on Monday in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, extending the stock’s decline to 7,5% this year link to Microsoft’s Xbox live gaming.

In the longer term, Skype would offer Microsoft another route to develop its mobile presence, an area it has already put more energy and resources into as personal computer usage comes under threat. Skype is set to become a new business division within Microsoft, with Skype CE Tony Bates in charge and reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The $8,5bn price tag was a surprise. Although the sum would not stretch cash-rich Microsoft, some said it was high for a company whose ownership has changed several times during its short life.

Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and its investors include eBay, private equity firm Silver Lake and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Mr Zennstrom and Mr Friis sold the company for $2,6bn in 2005 to eBay, which in turn sold off most if its stake four years later.

Microsoft lags behind Google in web search and related advertising.
Skype could be combined with Microsoft software such as Outlook to appeal to corporate users, while the voice and video communications could vices on Yahoo’s pages.

Tightly integrated Skype services could be an added selling point for Windows Phone 7, the mobile operating system Microsoft is promoting as a competitor to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS Mr Pescatore said. “Google is probably the one that’s getting the closest to Skype” with its voice product, though the Google Talk service is “not on par in terms of quality” and the Google Voice product is a late entrant and will find it difficult to catch up, said Leif-Olof Wallin, an analyst at Gartner in Stockholm.

CITIZENS USE INTERNET TECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT FRAUD

Source: A research professor at the University of Wits. South Africa.

TO FIGHT corruption, we need to harness the power of citizens and the power of the internet. In India, a site called IPaidABribe.com asks citizens who have been forced to pay a bribe to record it on the site anonymously if they wish. In fact, they can also report incidents in which they have not had to pay a bribe – and they want to praise an honest public servant.

The site collates the information, analyses and maps it, so that they can report the pattern of bribery across the country or across a city and carry a running total of recorded bribes. This is a powerful tool to pressure the government to act and provide pointers to where the need is most pressing.

In Brazil, where more than half of crimes go unreported because people don’t believe it is worth the effort, WikiCrimes.com asks citizens to record crimes they experiences or witness an a searchable map. “By breaking the authorities” monopoly on crime information and making relevant data more transparent WikiCrimes hopes to force real reforms in Brazil’s criminal justice system,” writes author and transparency activist Micah Sifry.M

In Croatia, blogger Marko Rakar posted a seachable database of all voters on the internet, Widespread fraud became obvious as people looked at the database, seeing nonexistent addresses or small buildings which purportedly housed hundreds of voters. In Russia, citizens who were angry with authorities abusing the “blue lights” that allowed some to race through traffic, asked commuters to record the number plates of cars using the lights – and showed how the law was being flouted.

Kenya lawyer Ory Okolloh believed the authorities were underplaying the post-election violence of 2008, so she created a website where incidents come be reported and mapped - and it became an indispensable guide to what was actually going on.
There are many other examples from around the world of people using the technology and the power of citizens working together to gather and make available information which challenges the authorities and empowers ordinary people. They range from a Chicago site, which allows people to map graffiti to others that track MP’s records of attendance, participation and voting.

All of these are making use of new technology to make the information accessible and unable. And many are harnessing crowd power – the fact that if thousands of citizens are providing and viewing the information, they can often be more effective than few journalists or experts at spotting the patterns trends and meaning in the data. Sometimes these sites ask ordinary people to volunteer to help them analyse masses of data. So when the Guardian of London had masses of obscure information on MP’s expenses, they put it all up and asked people to help them find the stories within it. Or when the Sunlight Reporting Group in the US wanted to find out how often congressmen paid their families with campaign funds, they posted all of their expense records and their family members’ details on a site, and asked people to help them find matches.

This is, Sifry argues, a transparency movement in which computer geeks and activists around the world are harnessing citizens and data in a way that calls authorities to account. While much attention has been focused on WikiLeaks and the behaviour of its founder, Julian Assange, there are enough examples to show the emergence of a global movement to empower citizens with information and force much greater transparency than ever before.

I raise this to contrast it with the way our government’s intelligence and security people are trying to turn back this tide with the Protection of Information Bill, which is up for discussion again in Parliament. On the one side are those using new tools to increase transparency and accountability and fight corruption and the abuse of power, on the other are those who want to buck the global trend and maintain control of the information and the political power that comes with it. Which side do you choose?

Cell Phone marketing

Now, with the next iteration of the Internet, the mobile Web is spreading around the world, and publishers and other content providers are trying to keep up, lest they get in late on another advertising bonanza. The number of cell phone users increases each year and mobile phone marketing must be more and more accepted as a necessary component of any advertising campaign.

According to statistics released by the Chinese government, the country had 889 million mobile phone subscribers by the end of March 2011, and it should cross the 900 million mark sometime next month. Mobile phone subscriptions have risen dramatically in the country in recent years. In March 2009, it had 670 million mobile phone users, and in March 2010, the number climbed to 776 million.

By comparison, the U.S. has 303 million mobile phone users. In South Africa, the total number of mobile subscriber accounts will increase to 51 million by 2012 and expected to grow about 67.5 million by the end of 2014," said Nizar Assanie, Vice President (Research) at IEMR ( ...but these figures needs to be corrected after the censures). Nizar Assanie said: "We expect that Vodacom will continue to be the largest mobile operator in the country with about 36 million subscribers in 2014. Also, our model predicts that MTN will have approximately 21.5 million subscribers and Cell C will have 9 million subscribers by the end of 2014."
A Cisco study predicts that by 2015, more than 5.6 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks, and there will also be 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes -- nearly the equivalent of one mobile connection for every person in the world. The research projects that annual global mobile data traffic will reach 6.3 exabytes per month, or an annual run rate of 75 exabytes, by 2015. That amount is the equivalent of 19 billion DVDs or 536 quadrillion SMS text messages or 75 times the amount of global Internet Protocol traffic (fixed and mobile) generated in the year 2000.

It is high time for Developers and publishers to align themselves with the rise of the mobile usage. If you are not currently taking advantage of this exciting new technology, you should start to think about ways that your company can take advantage of cell phone marketing.