ALU expected to challenge Cisco, Juniper in core

Alcatel-Lucent is reportedly ready to give Cisco and Juniper a run for the money in core routing. The company, which dukes it out with both in service provider edge routing, is about to pop a core router based on its 400Gbps FP3 processor, according to ITWire.

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Q4 challenges not a downturn, Cisco CEO says

After marked improvement in its business following the wrenching restructuring and "reinvention" Cisco's gone though over the past year, the company - and perhaps the industry - are not out of the woods yet.

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Warrior keynote on Cisco COPE

Implementing security policies into the network based on identity and other application and user awareness parameters will drive network programmability, with network-based APIs and customer-specific algorithms, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said last week during her Interop keynote address.

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Cisco's not on board, but is Shortest Path Bridging winning?

Is Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) winning the data center fabric standards battle? One could have walked away from Interop 2012 with that impression, given the level of interest in it during a conference session and the production implementations that were discussed at the show.

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How will Cisco COPE with SDNs?

Cisco's got a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture but it won't say much about it. SDNs are a hot topic industrywide with the promise of abstracting the physical network infrastructure from control of it, enabling more adaptability for things like cloud computing and easier feature extension.

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Cloud up there with root canal, Cisco study finds

More than one-third of IT decision makers would rather get a root canal, dig a ditch, or do their own taxes than address network challenges associated with public or private cloud deployments. So says a Cisco survey released at Interop this week.

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Intel Romley slowing sales of Cisco UCS?

While Interop is in full swing next week, Cisco will announce its fiscal 2012 third quarter earnings on Wednesday, May 9. At least one analyst expects Cisco to hit its targets, based on 35 interviews with channel partners in the US and Europe.

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Cisco, others to demo, discuss SDNs, BYOD, 10GBase-T

Early indications show that SDNs, BYOD and 10GBase-T will be big topics at Interop. Vendors are expected to demonstrate products in these areas, conference sessions will target them and attendees will likely be looking for solutions or answers to their pressing or potential requirements for them.

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Cisco's Jiandani has left the building

Let's see, Mario... check! Luca... check! Prem... check! Is anyone missing? Not anymore. Soni Jiandani has apparently left Cisco to join her spin-in comrades at their latest venture, Insieme Networks.

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Cisco rival beats, but disappoints

Juniper just can't win. Its stock soared yesterday after Q1 results beat Wall Street expectations, which were lowered after a challenging Q4, 2011.

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Cisco unapologetic on spin-in model

Cisco's taking some heat - again -- from the blogosphere for its spin-in innovation model, just after confirming its investment and likely acquisition of Insieme, a start-up chartered to develop programmable networking technology. Insieme is one component of Cisco's multipronged network programmability strategy.

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Cisco's commitment to change

Cisco is beating back the competition. So says CEO John Chambers during his morning address at the 16^th annual Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego.

"I'm not so sure the competition is getting tougher," he told the crowd of Cisco resellers and marketing associates. "It's not as tough as it was a year ago."

Some in the crowd agreed when he took a show-of-hands poll. Some also disagreed with him. From our limited vantage point, the show-of-hands looked about 50:50.

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Is Insieme Cisco's Nuova 2.0?

Is Insieme Nuova 2.0? Sources say the Cisco spin-in is developing what are essentially the next generation Nexus platforms, and has been granted all intellectual property for the Nexus 5000 and 5500 lines, including the ASIC and software engineers.

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Cisco e-mail service blacklists legit messages

An error in reconfiguring Cisco's IronPort SenderBase e-mail security service caused it to block outbound e-mail for Australian businesses earlier this week, and perhaps for some globally.

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Cisco, Juniper see government differently

Juniper's enterprise business may be doing better than expected this quarter, according to Oppenheimer & Co. Based on 26 interviews in the US and Europe, the investment firm says the Cisco rival is experiencing solid upgrade activity and a recovery in security and government spending.

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Meet Cisco/Insieme's recruiter

Meet a recruiter for Insieme, Cisco's SDN spin-in! She's Jessica Vernon and she's done this lots of times before.

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Cisco poaching rivals for SDN spin-in

Insieme Networks - the proper name of the SDN start-up that may be spun into Cisco - is actively recruiting people from around the Valley, according to two posts in the blogosphere this week. The recruits are not just coming from Cisco: SDNs start-ups Nicira and Big Switch have reportedly been hit, and Arista is targeted but says it hasn't lost anyone yet.

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Cisco's collaboration jab

Cisco's launch this week of video immersed collaboration tools is an attempt to pre-empt the impending integration of Skype with Microsoft Lync. That seems to be the overriding tone of the coverage of the Cisco announcements, which came at this week's Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando.

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Cisco losing router sales to HP?

Thanks to a Chinese market that grew 34%, HP more than doubled its enterprise router market share in 2011, according to Infonetics Research. China drove just about the entire enterprise router market in 2011 -- worldwide it grew only 2% from 2010, to $3.5 billion.

HP acquired a significant presence and product line in China with the 2009 acquisition of 3Com.

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Cisco helps users welcome BYOD

Cisco is taking this BYOD thing seriously. The company this week unveiled new and enhanced products designed to specifically manage yet optimize a workplace for employees plugging in their own personal devices.

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