Tag Archive for CSCO

| May 9, 2013
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Tech Disrupters

Tech DisruptersThe BusinesInsider notes that analysts at investment bank Citi (C) have issued a new research report, that takes a look at 10 disrupting technologies, According to the BusinessInsider these technologies will change the way we do business. The  firm which took $300 billion dollar taxpayer-funded bail-out looked into practically every sector you can think of: energy, entertainment, IT, manufacturing, and transportation among them.

SDN is too cheap to resist.One of the information technologies that Citi called a disrupter is Software Defined Networks (SDN). SDN’s simplify IT networks by separating the Control Plane (the intelligence) from the Data Plane (the packet forwarding engine). “Instead of having intelligence distributed across the network in separate boxes, SDN centralizes the Control plane in an overriding software layer which disseminates instructions to each router or switch.”

Citi claims that SDN is too cheap to resist. They cite data from IDC that says Software Defined Networking is expected to grow from just under $360 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion in 2016. Revenues are likely to be split between startups, traditional network vendors like Cisco (CSCO), and big IT vendors like IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ), and Dell.

SaaSThe progonistators at Citi also identified SaaS another disruptive opportunity. The article explains that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is Internet-based software delivery. Basically customers can use software that they’d otherwise have to buy via downloads or at a store. Examples include Google (GOOG) Apps, Microsoft (MSFT) 365 and Amazon (AMZN) web services.

In 2012, the SaaS market grew 26% to become an $18 billion market according to market research firm IDC.  According to Citi’s survey, SaaS has already captured 8% of their software wallets so far and firms expect to increase spending to 70% of their budget over time — a 9-fold increase.

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The Citi progonistators are so smart, they are at least a year behind the Bach Seat. I have covered cloud since 2011. I think we all know that cloud computing and software defined networking are information technology disrupters. Thanks guys.

 

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Category: Security | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| September 1, 2012
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Is Cisco buying Twitter followers for CSO?

Social mediaBrad Reese at BradReese.com writes that it seems ailing network giant Cisco (CSCO) has bought Twitter followers for Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior. Mr. Reese asks if Cisco purposely violate the Twitter rules that forbid the purchasing of accounts to gain followers?

Mr. Reese points to information from TwitterAudit which exposes Twitter fraud is reporting: Approximately half-a-million (509,426) of the Twitter followers of the network gear maker’s Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior, are fake Twitter accounts.

“Each audit takes a random sample of 50Cisco CSO Twitter accounts00 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”

Mr. Reese writes he ran the following Status People check on the 1.4 million Twitter followers of Cisco Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior:

Padmasree Warrior Twitter accounts

The practice of buying Twitter followers to boost your reputation in an online network seems to be mainstream business, as any Google search on the topic will show. It has also been covered by the New York Times, “Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame” Network World, “Inside the real economy behind fake Twitter accounts” and even mentioned on NPR

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I signed up to follow the networking business’s CSO to see what competitive insights I could gain from the CSO. The tweets coming out of the Cisco Chief Strategy Officer was were often so pointless that they seemed to be coming from a 16-year-old and not a key business person in the IT world.

The tweets were so pointless I just ignored them, now I am going to expend the effort to actually unfollow Warrior …..

Done – So now Cisco you will have to buy another Twitter followers to follow pointless tweets for your business leaders – Now get back to making great network gear.

 

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Category: Business, Networking | Tags: , ,
| May 15, 2012
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Internet of Things

Council imagines the Internet of Things as a world where everything can be both analog and digitally approached. It reformulate our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves.  Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.

The Machines Are Talking a Lot

Machine ti machine communication Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016 reports that Internet traffic continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Cisco says that the second leading source of internet traffic will be machines.

The networking giant says the source will be from machine-to-machine communications, or “M2M.” Brian Bergstein at MIT‘s Technology Review says to think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to Macnine to machine communicationseach other and to centralized computers what they’re detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. Cisco says M2M will grow, on average, 86 percent a year, reaching 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes by 2016 .

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Here comes a hot new chip for Internet of things

ARM ARM (ARMH), the semiconductor company whose chip technology powers most modern smartphones, has come up with a chip for the Internet of things (IoT). Om Malik at GigaOM reports that the Cortex-M0+ is an energy-efficient chip, optimized for use in everything from connected lighting to power controls to other home appliances. In a press release, the company explains:

The 32-bit Cortex-M0+ processor … consumes just 9µA/MHz … around one-third of the energy of any 8 or 16-bit processor available today, while delivering significantly higher performance …[to] enable the creation of smart, low-power microcontrollers to provide … wirelessly connected devices, a concept known as the ‘Internet of Things.’

At GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 event ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky said that “ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools and low-volume sales channels create an innovation ecosystem that is the foundation for an Internet of things.”

GigaOM says Freescale and NXP (NXPI), both are major suppliers to the automotive and home automation industries have signed up for the new ARM chip technology. Freescale and NXP have locations in the Farmington Hills, MI area.

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And another new chip for smart homes & appliances

Qualcomm Atheros Internet of Things at GigaOm recently noted that Atheros, a division of Qualcomm (QCOM) launched a new very low power consuming Wi-Fi chip, AR4100P, focused on the “Internet of Things.” He predicts that soon, there might be Wi-Fi in everything around us, including Samsung’s (005930) Wi-Fi enabled washing machines, which Malik wrote about earlier.

According to the blog, the new “highly integrated 802.11n single-stream Wi-Fi system-in-package with integrated dual IPv4 IPv6 networking stack” is focused on smart home and building controls and appliances. Atheros and other chip companies such as ARM are betting that the Internet of Things will prove to be a new giant market opportunity.

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The new Atheros chip also includes an IPv6 stack as well as 802.11n to give end-to-end control of your home appliances.

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The Web Connected Smelly Robot

Olly The web connected smelly robotThe Internet of Things now has smell-o-vision from Olly. Olly takes services on the Internet and delivers their pings as smell according to his web-site. Whether it’s tweets, a like on Instagram, Olly will be sure to let your nose know about it. Mint Foundry, a graduate design lab at Mint Digital dedicated to exploring the potential of web-connected objects developed Olly.

It is possible to change Olly’s smells in an instant. It has a removable section in the back which can be filled with any smell you like. It could be essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner’s perfume or even a drop of gin.

Olly is stackable, so if you have more than one, you can assign each one to a different service with a different smell. Connect one to Twitter and another to your calendar. Before you know it, you’ll have a networked Internet smell center claims the web-site.
Olly is not yet in production, but Mint is glad to offer the source files to anyone who’s got a 3D printer and a nose for adventure.
Category: Internet of Things | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 5, 2012
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Power over Ethernet 802.3af

ElectticityA client recently asked what happened to the network design rule of thumb which said do not install data cables anywhere near electrical cables? The fear of cross-talk, interference and corruption of the data traffic seems to have disappeared with Power over Ethernet (PoE). He rightly pointed out that now it seems OK to mix data and power in the same cable going to a networked device. 

Read part 2 here.

Old time telephonesPoE is similar in principle to the way that the copper wire pair that carries your POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) telephone signals into your house also carries enough electricity (48v DC) from the telco Central Office to power the phone’s core elements of headset, dial, and ringer. Power over Ethernet’s development stated with early implementations of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems. VoIP pioneers did not have a telco CO to power the phones and powering the VoIP phones with wall warts proved unreliable. The phones stopped working when unplugged from the wall or if the building lost power.

In 2000 Cisco (CSCO) developed the first successful technique of putting 48v DC on the LAN data cable along with the data traffic. This proprietary system allowed Cisco to overcome customer objections to wall warts and sell a lot of VoIP systems.

Cisco LogoCisco’s original PoE equipment was capable of delivering up to 10W per port. The endpoint and the Cisco switch negotiated the amount of power to be delivered based on a power value in the proprietary Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). The Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE) will send a Fast Link Pulse (FLP) on the transmit pair. The Powered Device (PD) connects the transmit line to the receive line via a low pass filter. And thus the PSE gets the FLP in return. Cisco’s original PoE implementation is not software upgradeable to the IEEE 802.3af standard. Cisco manufactured many IP phones and WLAN access points devices that were not compliant with the IEEE 802.3-2005 Clause 33 including:

Cisco pre-standard IP phones
7985G7960G7940G7910G7910G + SW
7912G7905G7902G7970G
Cisco IEEE 802.3af and pre-standard IP phones
7970G7961G7906G7941G
7911G7962G
The Cisco 7936 Conference Phone does not support any LAN based power and requires a Cisco power injection adapter
Source

Throughout 2001 and 2002, other VoIP and Wireless Access Point (WAP) vendors saw Cisco’s success and developed their own proprietary (and often non-interoperable) powering systems. As more proprietary systems were developed the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recognized the need to standardize PoE. The IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Committee assigned PoE technology to a new working subcommittee called 802.3af. The IEEE working group’s charge was to create a standardized version of the Power Over Ethernet, so that any manufacturer who wanted to could make their products PoE ready. The IEEE working group took commentary from 2001 to 2003 and released the ratified IEEE 802.3af-2003 Power over Ethernet standard in June 2003 which added clause 33 to the IEEE 802.3 standard

Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersThe 802.3af document describes how PoE systems should work.  The standard defines two types of PoE equipment, Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE) and the Powered Device (PD). Power Sourcing Equipment sends the power out over the LAN cabling system to the Powered Device. The PSE would send out a maximum of 15.4 watts DC per link to each device, (limited to standard Ethernet distances). 12.95 watts are assured to be available at the PD because some power is lost in the cable.

The nominal voltage is 48 V, over two of the four available pairs on a Cat. 3/Cat. 5e cable. “Phantom power” is used to allow the powered pairs to also carry data. This permits PoE use with 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX, which use only two of the four pairs in the cable, but also with 1000BASE-T (gigabit Ethernet), which uses all four pairs for data transmission. This is possible because all versions of Ethernet over twisted pair cable specify differential data transmission over each pair with transformer coupling; the DC supply and load connections can be made to the transformer center-taps at each end. Each pair thus operates in “common mode” as one side of the DC supply, so two pairs are required to complete the circuit. The polarity of the DC supply may be inverted by cross cables; the powered device must work with either pair: spare pairs 4-5 and 7-8 or data pairs 1-2 and 3-6. Polarity is required on data pairs, and ambiguously implemented for spare pairs, with the use of a bridge rectifier.(Source)

VoIP devicesPower Sourcing Equipment can be in two form factors. A PSE can be implemented as endspan which is an Ethernet switch with powered ports (a PoE enabled switch) or as midspan which is a power hub that is used along with a non-powered switch the end-user already has in place. PD’s can receive PoE equally well from either type of PSE per the standard. The decision to use a endspan or a midspan is left up to the end-user.  The end device can use either powering technique.

The Powered Device (PD) are network devices like VoIP phones, Wireless Access Points and IP cameras.which are capable of taking the power off the LAN cable, through the RJ-45 (8P8C) connector and using it to power itself. Some pre-standard PoE devices are incompatible with 802.3af equipment. More PoE ready PD’s are available every year  PoE ready end devices can reduce installation costs by as much as 90% over traditional powering techniques.  Among the newer PoE PD’s devices on the market or coming soon are IP Paging, Speaker Systems, POS Terminals, Door and Gate Security hardware, Public Information signs, Building Access, Temperature Control Systems, Stage Lighting, and Computers. These newer PD’s were pushing 802.3af to its limits and the IEEE began work to evolve the standard. This power limitation prevented “high power” devices that required up to 30W to be supported via the industry-standard PoE solution.

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Category: Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| January 5, 2012
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CSCO CEO Tries Bribing Shareholders To Get A Tax Break

Embattled Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers recently urged the networking giants shareholders to lobby congress for a big corporate tax break. He tried to bribe promised to increase their dividend if the tax break comes through reported the BusinessInsider.

Cisco SystemsBI explains the CEO was talking specifically about repatriation, the term for when multinational corporations bring cash from overseas back into the U.S. Today they are charged the full corporate tax rate, 35%.

Mr. Chambers has been the poster child for multinationals like Cisco wanting to be granted another so-called “repatriation tax holiday” that would allow them to bring back more than a trillion dollars at a much lower tax rate. He even appeared on a 60 Minutes arguing for the plan. (I have written about Cisco’s efforts to dodge taxes here and here)

Money bagsMr. Chambers made the case that a repatriation tax holiday would be of personal benefit to Cisco shareholders. “Repatriation at a rate of between zero and 2 percent puts us on a level playing field,” he said. If Cisco could bring its overseas funds back it would spend them on beefing up manufacturing sites, jobs and “if approved” the company would “increase dividends,” he said.

“The current tax system was developed when Microsoft (MSFT) wasn’t even public,” the Cisco CEO said. He urged the assembled to “Take time to send a note to members of congress and others,” he urged.

In 2004 Cisco and other multinationals were granted a tax holiday. Opponents of a tax holiday for repatriation aren’t convinced that Cisco needs the tax break now. Some say that multinationals have accumulated offshore cash through gimmicks. They also point out that corporations can borrow against their overseas stash at really low rates and will use this as an ongoing method to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

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