Articles about Cisco

Last week I began this series on large companies in turmoil by looking at Intel, which I saw trying to guarantee its future through enlightened acquisitions that actually emulated this week’s company -- Cisco Systems.

So if Cisco already knows how to assimilate other companies and technologies to stay ahead of the market, how can it have a problem? Cisco’s problem is its market is mature and being commoditized with all boats sinking. And this time there isn’t an obvious new idea to buy.

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If your office, like many others in businesses around the world, uses Cisco-branded telephones then you may have a big problem. The networking company issued a security advisory with the catchy name "cisco-sa-20130109-uipphone".

"Cisco Unified IP Phones 7900 Series versions 9.3(1)SR1 and prior contain an arbitrary code execution vulnerability that could allow a local attacker to execute code or modify arbitrary memory with elevated privileges", the notice warns.

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Networking leader Cisco announced on Sunday evening its intent to acquire San Francisco-based cloud networking company Meraki Inc. Cisco will pay approximately $1.2 billion in cash and incentives to acquire Meraki, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Meraki's portfolio of technologies includes a broad range of networking solutions, including mesh Wi-Fi, switching, security, and cloud-based mobile device management which currently target midmarket companies. In other words, companies with annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion. In the United States, this market segment is made up of approximately 200,000 companies, and it is looked at as a growth market for tech infrastructure providers.

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Networking infrastructure company Cisco announced on Tuesday evening that its first "Smart+Connected" city will be the planned community of Lake Nona, Florida which exists inside the city limits of Orlando. The fifteen-year Lake Nona project will be Cisco's first of nine planned Smart+Connected cities. The company first announced this initiative more than two years ago.

The Smart+Connected initiative is Cisco's experiment with building the communications infrastructure that connects all aspects of a community, from government to health care to education to enterprise to home and beyond. More than simply a communications ecosystem, the initiative is squarely focused on preparing for the nascent "Internet of things" era.

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Cisco's new Connect Cloud service is supposed to provide browser-based and remote network management features to users of some of its "Smart Wi-Fi" consumer routers. It's a pretty promising free set of features, and should impress anyone who likes to keep a close eye on their home wireless network with products like Spiceworks or Nmap. It includes such features as parental controls, media prioritization, and device management, and users can access it while at home or remotely via their mobile device.

Unfortunately it's had a pretty rough beginning.

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Cisco has taken the plate and swung hard for the fences with their new draft 802.11ac gigabit wireless router product, the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router EA6500.

Scheduled for release in August, the EA6500 is available as a $219.99 pre-order in Cisco's Web store. Besides the feature set of the latest draft 802.11ac for speeds of up to 1300 Mbps, it also includes a fancy new NFC (near field communication) capability for smart device admin access, and the new "Cisco Connect Cloud" which will allow remote monitoring and administration from a native mobile device app. The Cisco Connect Cloud will be free and also have support to control other home automation devices such as smart appliances, smart security systems, and smart TVs.

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In the world of Android-powered smartphones, Samsung is the reigning king. It sells approximately 40 percent of all the Android smartphones going to consumers today, and Forrester Research predicts proprietary Android builds (such as Samsung's TouchWiz) will actually surpass Google's Android ecosystem within three years. Of course, this fragments the market and causes trouble for developers and enterprises looking to create and deploy software for Android.

Monday, Samsung unveiled a new brand that will be applied only to Android devices that have been approved for enterprise use: SAFE, or "Samsung Approved for Enterprise." It's similar to Motorola's line of Enterprise Android devices called Motorola Business Ready, which debuted earlier this year.

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Cisco knows that the cloud is worthless without networking, so its Cloud Connected Solution announced on Wednesday shouldn't surprise anyone. The company debuted both new cloud-enabled software for its ASR and ISR routers as well as a virtualized router aimed at extending virtual private networks to the cloud.

This new router software will be found on the ISR G2 platform, and a new Aggregation Services Router (ASR) platform based router, the ASR 1002-X was introduced. Cisco announced new Unified Computing System (UCS) E-Series Server Modules on the ISR G2, which is also on the way.

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Ghanaian cinema may have already shown us that 2016 is going to be an awesome year, but this week networking technology company Cisco released its Visual Networking Index Forecast which makes some big predictions about data traffic in the year 2016 that are pretty mind-blowing themselves.

Cisco's VNI whitepaper is built upon reputable third-party analyst projections, in-house forecasts, and hard data collection, and it is part of the company's initiative to track the growth of "visual networking," or the use of video as the central communicative and entertainment medium over IP connections, including TV-over-Internet, social video, and video on demand.
In it, Cisco makes a number of noteworthy predictions:

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