Cisco has spent years making itself over into a collaborative culture, John Chambers said during a 
keynote address at Forrester Research's IT Forum in Las Vegas. But he describes the first two years of attempted collaboration at Cisco as "miserable," reports a story in
Network World. Indeed, collaboration efforts within Cisco almost failed entirely. An effective Web 2.0 strategy has to be spearheaded by
a CEO, but leadership also has to give up some power to make it work, Chambers noted. Cisco learned to embrace both Web 2.0
and collaboration technologies including blogging, wikis, various forms of presence (such as its own product,TelePresence).
Chambers said. "It took me making some changes. About 20% of my leadership did not make it through this." READ MORE.
Cisco faces a new challenge to its branch-office security offerings. SonicWall is coming out with a new appliance that handles bidirectional 1Gbps throughput for its unified 
threat management platform that lacks some of the routing, WAN optimization and VoIP support that Cisco's ISR branch-office gear supplies. But SonicWall says its box performs at 1Gbps with all its security features turned on - something Cisco doesn't lay claim to with the ISR. The question is what balance of price, architectural efficiency and level of security customers will want.
Avici Systems , which entered the core router market back in 1997 and bailed last April after fighting an uphill battle vs. Cisco and Juniper, hasn't entirely gone away. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that Soapstone Networks, a business that grew out of Avici and that concentrates on telecom management, had such a good year in 2007 that it ranked 3rd on the Boston Globe's annual Globe 100 listing of publicly-held companies.
A study by market tracker Ovum and commissioned by Cisco finds that the market for four specific managed services will grow to $66 billion by 2012.
Cisco and China: Again05/20/08As we mentioned last week, Cisco's dealings with China have continually come under scrutiny (See our Q&A with China expert James Fallows ). Today, the Washington Post brings up the issue again in a story about a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Global Internet Freedom Act, which is focused on nixing Internet censorship. The story begins:
Harrah's is big deal for Cisco 05/20/08Cisco is bettting that a huge 10-year agreement with Harrah's casino and hotel chain will give it a leg up in the security and gaming industries. Cisco and Harrah's are building 
an IP-based video surveillance network in 31 properties worldwide, and collaborating on new ways to make sure customers never forget coming to a Harrah's casino. One possibility: digital signs that react to your eye movements, and adjust the content based on your interest level. A little spooky, perhaps, but when you're at the slot machines and blackjack tables every move you make is already being watched. If Harrah's utilizes this particular technology, which isn't certain yet, you can drop any illusion of privacy you might have had when stepping foot into a casino.
Could a marriage between Cisco and EMC be in the works? It's just an interesting idea -- there is no juicy rumor or speculation
swirling around the industry -- but Yahoo!'s tech ticker is offering up the possibility as perhaps the next big deal in IT. It seems to make a lot of sense...
Members of the Silicon Valley janitors union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877, 
have voted to go on strike. The union provides janitorial services to Silicon Valleys' high-tech and bio-tech corporate campuses including Cisco, Apple, HP, Intel, Oracle, Applied Materials, Yahoo, Google and others. A press release from the union says that the strike would be the first major one in California since 2000, when Los Angeles janitors staged a three-week strike. That strike became a focal point of discussion about immigrant workers across the nation.
The new Cisco TelePresence System 500 is videoconferencing at a lower cost than Cisco's other offerings, but Computerworld Canada last week quoted analysts who noted that not only is the 500 not that low in cost, but it also can ring up high bandwidth costs.
Power and cooling: Cisco vs. EnterasysIn data center design, power and cooling constraints are one of the top issues. Below are two charts that compare the power consumption and cooling requirements for some popular Cisco switches ...Read more
Brad Reese is research manager at BradReese.Com, advancing the careers of 1 million certified individuals in the growing Cisco Career Certification Program.
A Failure to Plan Means… What?Last Tuesday's post and survey has had enough time to cook, so today I'm going to continue that thread, summarize some of the feedback, and talk about why some of ...Read more
Wendell Odom, CCIE No, 1624, splits time between writing books for Cisco Press and teaching classes for Skyline ATS. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including his newest book Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Read a sneak peek of chapter 7). Follow Wendell's blog here. More free chapters from other Cisco Press books here.
Burning Down Your VPN with Super Broadband SpeedsI read an article earlier this year about how Comcast is planning to upgrade broadband access speeds to as fast at 160 Mbps. From almost all perspectives, this is ...Read more
Morris is a Technical Team Lead and Network Architect at a $3 billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos, and developing large-scale routing designs.
IPv6 at the 2008 OlympicsIn my previous post I threw out a few thoughts about the idea of enticing users to switch to IPv6 – a sort of variation on the long-running “we ...Read more
Jeff is president of Jeff Doyle and Associates, an IP networking consultancy, and author of Routing TCP/IP, Volumes I (read an excerpt) and II. Read the transcript of our live online text chat with Jeff entitled "IPv6: Will matter to the enterprise in five years."
Audit and lockdown your Cisco routers quickly using Router and Security Device Manager90+% of Cisco Router administrators are CLI jockeys, myself included. However, there are several GUI tools that can help you manage and secure your Cisco routers very quickly. ...Read more
Jamey Heary, CCIE No. 7680, is a security consulting systems engineer at Cisco. Jamey is the author of Cisco NAC Appliance: Enforcing Host Security with Clean Access. Read a chapter from the book here. Follow Jamey's blog here. More free chapters from other Cisco Press books here.
Security concerns arise for home workers allowed to VPN into company networks, Cisco 800 Series was the perfect fitSecurity concerns arise for home workers allowed to VPN into company networks I was recently brought in by a company who had a security breach due to a home user who ...Read more
Larry Chaffin, Ph.D, is the CEO/chairman and founder of Pluto Networks a consulting company specializing in VoIP, WLAN and security. He is also author of a number of books including Managing Cisco Secure Networks, Skype Me, Practical VOIP Security, and Configuring Check Point NGX VPN-1/Firewall-1.
Cisco SmartCare Examined The most interesting thing about Cisco’s new SmartCare announcement (see lead story) is not the fact that it can help prevent network outages before they emerge. It’s the way that ...Read more
Ken Presti is president of Presti Research & Consulting, Inc., which specializes in go-to-market strategies for technology vendors and service providers.
CCIE Voice / CCVP Exam Objectives #4: H.323So far in this series I have described two telephony protocols (SIP and MGCP) that feature prominently on the CCIE Voice and CCVP exam blueprints. In this blog entry, I ...Read more
Mark Lewis (CCIE#6280) is an independent consultant who helps service provider and large enterprise clients design and implement leading-edge technologies. Mark has designed and implemented a variety of large-scale technology solutions including VPN, MPLS, QoS, data center, and IP telephony. Mark is the author of Comparing, Designing, and Deploying VPNs; Troubleshooting Virtual Private Networks; and CCIE Voice Exam Quick Reference Sheets.
What IS an Ethical Practice Exam?Ethics - set of moral principles: a theory or system of moral values (Websters). Throwing out the term “Ethical practice exam” is easy to do…but what does it mean? Here’s how ...Read more
Jeremy D. Cioara, CCIE No. 11727, is the owner of AdTEC Networks, an IT consulting firm. We've got 15 copies of his new book CCNA Practice Questions (Exam 640-802), 3rd Edition, up for grabs. Go here for details on how to win a copy. Go here for a sneak peek of a chapter.
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Cisco Forums at Networking-Forum.com
Four holes in Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Cisco has issued a security advisory for Cisco Unified Communications Manager (formerly Cisco CallManager). Patches are now available to fix four denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities all of which were discovered internally by Cisco, the company says. The following services are affected: Certificate Trust List (CTL) Provider, Certificate Authority Proxy Function (CAPF), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Trap. READ MORE.
READ MORECisco security responses
Cisco security advisories
WIN FREE BOOKS. We're giving away 15 copies of the Cisco Press book CCNA Practice Questions (Exam 640-802), 3rd Edition by Jeremy Cioara (a $24.99 value). Read Chapter 2: Switching Foundations. Check out the author's guest blog here. Copies of the book are for sale here.
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Cisco has launched a support wiki for partners and customers to share their knowledge of Cisco gear on top of Cisco documents. According to Cisco: "This augmentation of knowledge gives our user community a medium to share knowledge and improve their overall effectiveness."
VIDEORob Salvagno, senior director of Business Development, discusses Cisco's Nuova acquisition, a follow-on to Cisco's initial investment in August 2006. Nuova's first product is the Nexus 5000.
VIDEOJapan's NTT Group deploys new Cisco ASR 1000 Series routers to deliver advanced services. (3:54)
PODCASTTop analyst discusses edge networking trends and environmental and cost of ownership benefits that new Cisco ASR 1000 Series routers deliver to service providers relative to competitive solutions. (10:37)
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