Cisco Live was quite the event (check out our full Cisco Live! guide for a quick look back), and with 15,000 attendees in person and 40,000 watching virtually, it certainly felt like everyone with any interest in the company or its technology was there. But if you weren’t able to make it out to Vegas (or attend every session you wanted), a lot of the material presented live is now available from Cisco Live Virtual, including a lot of video, briefing decks, tutorials and more. Cisco even included the keynotes, including the flashmob opening featuring dozens of Cisco employees (see after the jump for a preview).

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Cisco’s making it clear that the Cius “is not just a tablet” and “much more than a tablet” and “not a tablet.” Mention the word “tablet” around a Cisco executive and you can visibly see muscles tighten and for good reason: The Cius doesn’t stand up well as a standalone device against the iPad, or even the newer Android tablets, and Cisco’s recently-watched RIM’s PlayBook, marketed as the professional-grade tablet, flame out in spectacular fashion.

And Cisco has a leg to stand on when arguing it’s not a tablet. Tom Puorro, senior director of product management at Cisco, said the device was developed primarily by the company’s IP telephony group, which means much of its design and functionality DNA comes straight from Cisco’s high-end desk phones, and if you think of it in that vein – as a replacement for a desk phone that runs in the hundreds of dollars – then it begins to make some sense. Cisco is highly encouraging coupling the device with a purpose-built stand that includes a sturdy IP phone and even letting them plug in an external monitor that can be used to operate the Cius in a desktop-like fashion, complete with external mouse and keyboard.

Even by Cisco standards, however, it’s a pricey phone: The stand for the Cius runs $300 by itself, bringing the price for this package up to around what Cisco originally planned on.

When I asked Barry O’Sullivan, head of Cisco’s voice technology group, how they managed to chop off $250 from the original price, he said manufacturing volume and increased sales projections. How high were those projections?

“We sell 7 million IP phones a year, so somewhere in the order of that magnitude,” he said. “We don’t break out those numbers.” Puorro chimed in with more modest goals: “More than one.” For comparison, RIM’s PlayBook sold a million its first quarter and was reportedly on track for 800 thousand its second quarter.

Incapable by its own standards

Puorro was, of course, joking about Cisco’s aspirations: Cisco has quietly been selling the device to a few select customers before its more general release, through qualified partners, later this month. The publicly announced ones are generally cozy relationships: AT&T and Verizon, both of which hope to resell the devices for a hefty margin into the enterprise, and some educational customers which reported their students loved getting a first look at new hardware.

I found, however, that the Cius was a less-than-capable device at the points Cisco most eagerly promoted. For example, one of the verticals Cisco has been widely touting is healthcare, which has always been an early adopter of tablets. But one of the hypothetical situations the company references – using the back facing camera to send live video of a patient from a nurse to a doctor at home – simply does not work. You can record video with the back camera, but there is no option to switch to it or use it in a video call, meaning that the hypothetical stroke victim is now asked to hold onto the Cius, steady it, and follow the doctor’s instructions on helping him remotely inspect the potential trauma.

A Cisco engineer said that this feature would be addressed, and in fact it has been: By Apple, which implemented that exact feature about a year ago. No timeline for Cisco’s implementation was given.

Another widely touted feature was the remote desktop and desktop virtualization capabilities of the Cius, particularly when coupled with the above-mentioned stand.

“Cius represents a consolidation of the desktop,” Puorro said, stating that he no longer used a PC and instead did all his work right on a docked Cius.

With most monitors, however, the Cius offers a distorted view (the Cius 153.6:90.0 screen is stretched to fit, for example, a 16:9 monitor). A Cisco executive said that some higher-end monitors can correct for this. And while there are some clever new elements (right clicking brings up a clickable version of the Android menu bar, for example), some standard short cuts won’t work.

More importantly, the device is laggy as a desktop replacement: Like with most Android tablets, there’s a noticeable pause when doing a variety of tasks. The worst case might be typing: Typing a long URL into the web browser, for example, and the characters will start to trail your fingers. The problem is dramatically compounded by the virtual desktop tools, where network latency is added into the mix and further compounds the problem. It’s perfectly fine for typing in quick notes or even working in a pinch. Elsewhere on the tablet, apps would randomly crash, even though the demo devices had very few apps installed. These sorts of problems are what sparked the eternal wars between users and IT.

Coming soon

Just like the fully-functional back facing camera update, Cisco executives promised that a number of important features and fixes were “coming soon.” The operating system itself is still Android 2.x, built for smart phones. Cisco executives said that the company plans on updating the machines to the tablet-ready Ice Cream Sandwich at some point in the future, but there was no timetable. Meanwhile, one of the Cius’ key features, business-defined app stores-within-a-store, was just announced by Apple, even as vendors have worked quickly to fill other enterprise needs for control. Even Cisco has produced a great WebEx iPad app, yet again reducing the advantages the Cius can offer to the enterprise.

And on the low-end, I have to wonder if much of what the Cius is offering cannot be achieved not only more cheaply but more effectively with a smart phone device: For any employee who has to lug it around all day, the Cius is a relatively weighty piece of hardware. If you’re shooting and sending video, the latest generation of smartphones might work even better as far as being both intuitive and portable.

Missing the party … for now

During the keynote with CTO Padmasree Warrior and CIO Rebecca Jacoby, the executives made clear that the era of “just say no” to consumer devices was over. It really feels like, however, the Cius team didn’t get that memo. The stated feature list and problems the device addresses are very real – the importance of locking down data on mobile devices cannot be overstated – but vendor after vendor on the showroom floor was taking a more nuanced approach, offering web and native apps that balanced the business needs with the user demands by running securely on the device of choice.

The Cius approach is the opposite, offering a mashup of an older Android OS and custom Cisco software, freedom and control, all at a higher price point. It’s a strategy I’ve seen many vendors take with Android, and few if any offer an improved experience. I found myself wishing that the Cius had a little more Flip DNA in it and a little less of its IP phone heritage.

Internally, I spoke with a number of typically tight-lipped employees that felt the Cius was a product of the pre-lean Cisco, a product that was built and developed when Chambers thought Cisco could do it all. Having spent all that time and energy developing it, it would be a mistake not to release it and see what happens.

There is ample reason for hope long term for the Cius’ descendants, however. First of all, there will be a large segment of IT that will embrace the ideas and control the Cius promises, giving it at least some built in-usage early on. More importantly, however, I think that the Cius platform can potentially be a great teaching tool for Cisco and its partners in learning what works, and as long as something works, Cisco will come out ahead. They are, after all, providing the pipes over which video will be flowing no matter what software it uses.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.

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So the big news of Cisco’s upgraded Catalyst 6500 should not have been that big a surprise, but it sure felt like a letdown. Last year, we got Cisco announcing they were blazing tracks into a brand new area for them – the tablet! – and this year, all we get it a refresh to a 12-year-old product. So can the humble tech press, myself included, be forgiven for highlighting “new” features like “IPv4 and IPv6 support” support, even those Catalyst 6500 has supported that for years? I hope so, because it’s an important and impressive product with an interesting strategy (“most” of the new features and capabilities being offered do not even require a full upgrade). And more importantly, it highlights Cisco’s new-found strategy: Retreat to move forward.

Cisco’s realized that, as great as its Nexus line is, many of its core customers, the ones coming year in and year out to Cisco Live for example, still preferred the old, familiar, conservative way of doing things. Why throw out Cisco IOS for something new and different when you can have an upgraded version of the old?

Which is exactly what Cisco’s delivered, coupled with a promise of much more bang for your buck than HP (claims the latter disputes). Or, as my colleague Rivka Little so perfectly put it, “Cisco served up comfort food for the networking masses on the first day of Cisco Live 2011, sidestepping edgy cloud announcements and focusing instead on a major Catalyst 6500 upgrade.”

It should also be comfort food for Cisco’s shareholders. Has Jim Duffy notes, the leaner, meaner Nexus series has slashed profit margins for Cisco on a per-port basis, just as its starting to lose marketshare to budget competitors. Promising a more reliable, overall cheaper experience might be one way to staunch the bleeding even as it remains free to break new ground with Nexus.

Now that that’s out of the way, I highly recommend reading Rivka’s piece, which dives into the deep details of what makes the Catalyst 6500 tick, including the excellent service modules Cisco’s rolling out that will bake in firewall (yawn) and incredibly granular quality-of-service that segregates not just voice but also priority of voice calls, for example (now we’re talking.

Check back soon for the one glaring exception to Cisco’s new found conservatism, or chime in the comments on what you think it is or, more importantly, what you think of the Catalyst 6500 refresh.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guidefor more breaking news.

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Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guidefor more breaking news.

The reductions were not completely unexpected, given the renewed focus on Cisco core businesses, but they are deep: About 14 percent of Cisco’s total workforce. Cisco has not confirmed the reports, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg it “will provide additional detail on the cost reductions” on its next quarterly earnings call.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.

“With more than 500 patents, the Catalyst 6500 scales the network infrastructure scales the network infrastructure with next-generation innovations like IPv6 support, virtualization, 40G-readiness, Netflow, security, and mobility all with operational continuity. The new Catalyst 6500 builds on Cisco’s switching heritage in four key areas:

1.) New Supervisor Engine 2T (available on all E-series chassis) triples the performance of its previous edition; quadruples the scalability; Offers 200 new software features for security, mobility, application, voice/video, virtualization

2.) New 6900 Series Modules doubles the bandwidth to 80 GB per slot, ridding over-subscription of 10 GbE 8-port 10GbE cards; New performance standard with rich integrated services (e.g. line-rate MacSec encryption).

3.) New 6800 Modules drive a new level of price-performance across 10 GbE and GbE portfolio with rich integrated services and integrated Distributed Forwarding Capability.

4.) Next-gen Service Modules for mobility, security, application monitoring, network management

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.

I’ve always assumed Cisco’s TelePresence, its pricey, life-like videoconferencing tool, was something of a loss leader for the company, a way to tout the benefits of video, which helps sell its core networking products. That made running into Thomas Wyatt, vice president of Cisco TelePresence Infrastructure, a bit awkward. It was more awkward when he helped break down the numbers:

• TelePresence was a $1.7 billion dollar business for Cisco in 2010 Fiscal Year.
• It’s seeing about 30 percent growth year-over-year, which Wyatt said he expects to continue.
• Bank of America, the largest single TelePresence buyer, has deployed about 700 systems.
• Cisco has deployed about 1,000.

I had just been told that the Chinese market currently makes up just 3 percent of Cisco’s total sales, and so I couldn’t resist running the math: With “over” $40 billion in sales total in Fiscal Year 2010, Cisco’s TelePresence business makes up 4.25 percent of the company’s sales, or a fair chunk of change more than China. Wyatt said he’d never thought of it that way but seemed fairly pleased with the news nonetheless.

Those are extremely tidy sums, getting a little closer to justifying the early boast that TelePresence was the “green technology of the century,” but the numbers still seemed extraordinarily high. Wyatt helpfully pointed out that Cisco’s expanded the definition to include lower-end devices as well as purely-software driven deployments (internally, he said, about half of Cisco employees use TelePresence via software coupled with off-the-shelf or built-in web cams; externally, most still use dedicated hardware). Some of this “lower end” hardware is still expensive: Options like the MX200 are considered aggressively low priced at just under $10,000.

Still, it doesn’t include Cisco’s unified communication suites like WebEx or Jabber, highlighting just how far Cisco’s been able to push enterprises on the idea that investing in video can offer some real payoffs down the line, whether it’s in reduced travel costs or improved collaboration.

And Wyatt isn’t just boasting when he said he expects to continue hitting around the 30 percent growth mark: He explained that Cisco is working hard to integrate Movi technology, acquired when Cisco bought Tandberg and ideal for mobile video, into its instant messaging Jabber protocol, further expanding the market and reach of its video ambitions while helping standardize protocols.

Given all the achievements and potential for continued growth, it’s easy to see why Cisco flagged video as one of its five corporate priorities. Hey, if it’s good enough for Jack Donaghy, there’s probably not a red-blooded corporate shark out there that would dare make a pass.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.

We see all of these market transitions going on at the same time; so, instead of doing 1 or 2 [priority initiatives] a year, like we did during each of the economic slowdowns—the four that we’d seen before—we’re going to do 30. And it sounds impossible.

- John Chambers to McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009

That said, today we face a simple truth: we have disappointed our investors and we have confused our employees.  Bottom line, we have lost some of the credibility that is foundational to Cisco’s success – and we must earn it back. Our market is in transition, and our company is in transition.  And the time is right to define this transition for ourselves and our industry.  I understand this.  It’s time for focus.

- John Chambers memo to Cisco employees, April 2011

It was a wholly ambitious plan, and one that, if executed, would not just have grown Cisco’s position as the networking infrastructure provider, but would have grown it to be a dominant communications provider in both the enterprise and consumer space. Cisco was moving from being an enterprise darling with limited mass visibility to a company that would touch every bit and byte of communications at almost every point: From taking video and voice on its broad line of professional phones and pricey TelePresence to the budget and beloved Flip camera, to the wireless and wired switches that carry that video and voice, to the telecom infrastructure that carries them worldwide, to new, interactive viewing experiences.

But Chambers realized, two years later, that Cisco wasn’t cut out to be a consumer company, at least not now. And so at this Cisco Live!, the company is chastened but not humbled and cutting back from 30 priorities to just 5 fundamentals:

• Switching and routing, coupled with security and mobility.
• Video
• Collaboration
• Data center
• Business Architecture

Marie Hattar, vice president of borderless networks at Cisco, explained that the “business architecture” focus boiled down to a focus on products that transformed business practices: You’re not building a high-end switch or an HD television with a fancy camera on top, you’re building a way to cut travel costs while boosting remote collaboration.

Cisco has a receptive audience for this narrowed focus: A record 15,000 attendees are at Mandalay Bay this year to see what Cisco has in store, according to Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s executive vice president of worldwide operations, many of them Cisco loyalists from when the prime event was still called Networkers. “We’re going to reward that loyalty,” Lloyd said.

That 15,000 number isn’t counting those who tune in online or attend one of the other global events, spanning Mexico, London and Australia. But the one thing almost all of this international audience has in common is that they’re the IT professionals, business bean counters and other ordinary folk who have helped put Cisco in the Fortune 100 year in and year out, and Cisco executives said they were determined to put them squarely in their sights when determining where to take the company.

“We’re realizing we have to bring together all these,” Hattar said, stating that Cisco’s internal teams have become more cross-departmental and collaborative. “It causes some discomfort, but at the end of the day it’s best for our customer.”

Lloyd put it directly: “Cisco is a very focused company right now.”

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.