Cisco

Cisco to add a job-matching service

Cisco certifications recently reached 1 million but long-time rumors of the program starting an official job matching service may be actualized this summer.

In an interview conducted by news writer Michael Morisy, Fred Weiller, director of switching product and solutions marketing at Cisco intimated that “they were working on an official Cisco career marketplace to match certified professionals with jobs.”

With all the talk of having to survive a recession in the IT industry (whether or not we’re actually in one is entirely debatable), extra job-support programs may be the perfect answer.

If you look at some of Cisco’s existing sites, however, it seems they’ve already provided quite the gamut of career-excelling resources: Take, for example, Cisco’s career resources page or their Career Connection center which “seeks to link Networking Academy students and graduates with employers who are looking for job-ready IT and Networking candidates.” Cisco’s Digital Divide Best Practices Web page features job search strategies for entry-level students and more.

What might separate these resources from Cisco’s “official” job matching service? Should we expect to see a Dice or Monster-like site from Cisco? And what should people do in the interim (besides visit the previously mentioned sites)?

We see the questions in our SearchNetworking.com editor’s inbox every other day: Is it better to get a certification or to get experience? Should I get educated or certified? Even though certification, education and experience all work toward the same goals — doing one seems to prevent you from performing the other; When future IT pros make their way through a higher education program, the requirements of the learning institution can supersede certification goals — and when current IT pros aspire to earn certifications or degrees, many times their employment obligations sap valuable time and energy away from pursuing further education.

To combine all three facets in your job-seeking path, IT training and certification expert Ed Tittel mentions this: “The best thing you can do for yourself … is to get into a degree plan where you also earn certifications on your way to an AA or BA in an IT discipline of some kind. Many programs include such options or requirements nowadays, and will give you the best of both worlds.”

Now if those certifications you decide to go into are of the Cisco persuasion, you can kill three birds with one stone, as they might help you find the job opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Lost in Translation

So I’m not going quit my day job and run off to The Onion anytime soon, but my recent efforts at spoofing a Cisco announcement did at least fool someone, some of the time. The article stated Cisco was planning on replacing current “carbon-based” layer 8 appliances with sturdier, less fault-prone, and less human counterparts. A confused reader with an India Times e-mail address (reporter?) sent a follow up e-mail to me:

***Kindly put some Lights***
Dear morisy,

I read the artical from tech target on Cisco re-thinks Layer 8 networking with green components . But its diffcult for me to understand what actually u are going to tell us.

The only thing that i understood is that cisco is going to launch T-Series products which are based on layer 8 . And which are environment friendly. Kindly can you put some lights on the same in brief….

Regards,
–Name Removed–

The “layer 8″ I was referring to, of course, was a reference to the 7 layer OSI model, though even some experts think users should count as an eighth level, given how many problems they cause in the network. No BitTorrenting! No streaming music! If only there were a way to patch and re-boot …

Fake news aside, if you ever have questions about an article, really wish we’d cover something, or think my writing is unclear, wishy-washy, and unfit for print, e-mail us! I love hearing from readers, and the more feedback we get the more on target we can make our coverage. I can be reached at mmorisy at techtarget.com.

If fake news is more your thing, though, check out Alex Howard’s blog post recapping yesterday’s April Tomfoolery.

Cisco at VoiceCon Orlando 2008

Cisco has been relatively quiet at VoiceCon Orlando 2008. Well, they did make a bit of a splash today with a keynote address that featured CEO John Chambers and former vice president Al Gore discussing how communications technology can do its part to fight global climate change. I’ll have more on that later over at SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.

However, unlike many of the vendors here, both big and small, Cisco made no major announcements. Every other vendor here killed a small forest of trees to print out press releases about new products, new partnerships and new customer wins. Cisco was content to demonstrate some of its existing flagship technologies, such as telepresence.

While in Orlando this week, I did meet with Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions. He hinted at some news Cisco would be offering up later this year.

First of all, something is clearly brewing with WebEx, the online meeting technology that Cisco acquired last year.

“I’d say stay tuned to the WebEx space,” Cohen said. “When you look at our unified communications portfolio, our UC product stack, it’s about messaging, IP telephony, contact center, Cisco mobility. But its also about new video and visual products like telepresence and WebEx. You’ll see tighter integration between premise UC products and WebEx products.”

It sounds like Cisco is poised to integrate WebEx into its UC platform as some sort of collaboration space.

Cohen said something is also brewing with Securent, which Cisco bought last November. Securent is a policy engine, which has now been renamed Cisco Policy Manager. Cohen said Cisco will be making an announcement with Securent later this spring and he hinted that this announcement would help companies collaborate with each other.

“The question isn’t, can you and I send email or share files,” Cohen said. “The question is, can I enter your UC environment to collaborate with you and basically be a part of your business in a digital way? You need a policy that says you’re allowed from this hour to this hour to come into this part of my office digitally and see my information stream. Expect to see a lot more on this from us.”

It also sounds like Cisco is getting ready to make some noise in the social networking space by leveraging recent acquisitions such as Tribe.net and Five Across.

“What we see is when you take business unified communications and add social networking, you get collaboration,” Cohen said. “What we’re working on is making social networking safe and reliable for business. You’ll see a lot of that in our product direction. I think you’re going to see a larger vision of that.”

So Cisco has been somewhat quiet this week, but it sounds to me that they’ll be announcing some very interesting products later this year in the communications and collaboration area. Stay tuned.

iPhone targets the enterprise with new apps, Cisco VPN client

The iPhone was already doing a pretty good job creeping into the enterprise, despite early concerns about its security and manageability. Now, Apple is taking steps to allay those fears; yesterday, the company unveiled new features designed to help the iPhone better fit into the enterprise.

Early critics of the iPhone disliked its closed OS, which prevented third-party developers from creating new applications for the device. This limited the ways the phone could access corporate applications, most prominently, “push” email.

Now, Apple intends to open its software development kit by June, enabling the development of enterprise-worthy applications.

Jason Brooks speculates in his eWeek blog that the new apps will give the iPhone a leg up over RIM and Palm:

I expect that Treos will begin to wither in the eyes of one-time loyalists, and that erstwhile thumb-keyboard addicts will start to judge their BlackBerrys to be significantly sourer.

That’s good news for Apple fans; what’s perhaps even better news for network people is the integration of Cisco’s VPN client software. According to Network World blogger Jamey Hearey:

This will be a full blown IPSEC client that will even support the use of certificates or password based multi-factor authentication. Very nice! The iPhone VPN client will be able to connect to Cisco VPN gateway devices, like the Cisco ASA and older Cisco PIX.

Hearey, a security consulting systems engineer at Cisco, also points out that Apple announced its plans to support WPA with 802.1x authentication. “This will enable more enterprises to allow the iPhone to connect securely to their wireless infrastructure,” Hearey wrote.

Apple also opened an iPhone Enterprise Beta Program, through which enterprise developers can play with the 2.0 code before the official launch later this year. Check out Apple’s “iPhone Enterprise” page to read more about the program or view video of Steve Jobs making the announcement:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

It seems that the iPhone is unstoppable. Unfortunately, I won’t have one until they give them to you free with a three-year, $35/month service contract.

‘Fourth Generation’?! Cisco responds to Wi-Fi whippersnappers

A few hours after posting my story on Extricom’s and Meru’s approaches to wireless networking, I got an e-mail from Cisco expressing their disappointment in not getting to tell their “side of the story” on fourth generation wireless. Setting aside the fact that I e-mailed them for comment the morning before, I was curious about their take. Michael King, a research director with Gartner, had speculated that Extricom or Meru might be ripe for a Cisco acquisition within the next several years.

That possibility sounded pretty remote when I spoke with Cisco this afternoon. Ben Gibson, senior director of mobility solutions marketing for Cisco, said the company views channel layering/blanketing solutions (like Meru and Extricom use) as different, but not necessarily in a good way. He said these implementations, while they may or may not explicitly break standards, break the standards spirit and this has been shown, he said, to cause problems for other nearby networks. “I think it also introduces a lot of questions about such an approach to really scale properly,” he said. Cisco has been touting their Duke case study as the world’s largest .11n network, so it would seem they have scale down pretty well.

Cisco also wasn’t too happy with the designation of “fourth generation.” Gibson said most of the problems these systems solve have already been solved better by traditional players (namely Cisco). Sub-50 ms hand offs. Seamless VoIP calling. Ubiquitous, consistent wireless access no matter where you are or or how the wind is blowing. All with what they tout as better, more complete security.

“The next generation to me is, how do you turn it from a wireless network to a true mobility application network?” Gibson said. He said it was Cisco, not Meru/Extricom, who was paving the way for this fourth generation with integrated device chips that can boost wireless performance, with VoIP handsets, with location-aware applications.

So no love lost between Cisco and the new(er) kids on the block, but then again both Extricom and Meru didn’t particularly seem to enjoy being lumped together when I talked to them. It’s a pretty cut-throat industry, not the least because it appears primed to get much bigger over the next few years as enterprises start to look at the real possibility of going almost 100% wireless, meaning huge opportunities for the winners.

Enjoy watching the back and forth? Cisco’s mobility blog has posts that explain why they’re better than Aruba and, more amusingly, draw networking lessons from pre-marital classes. I couldn’t find blogs for any of the other wireless vendors.

As for me, I honestly couldn’t say who has the best approach, but feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments or, if you’ve had first-hand experience with some of the platforms, e-mail me at mmorisy@techtarget.com. Who knows, maybe there will even be a CCNA Video Mentor in it for you if you’re interviewed.

Who is the “new” networking pro?

For more than a year, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about the concept of the “new” networking pro from networking vendors and pundits alike. The idea is, in a nutshell, that the old-school network guy spent his time thinking about network plumbing — connectivity, throughput, and Layer 3 hardware. Our publisher likens this guy to the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. (Don’t you work with at least one IT guy who looks a bit like that, after all?)

At the other end of the spectrum is the “new” networking pro, who is supposed to look like the guy below, in the suit. This person takes into account evolving technologies and network convergence. His concerns go beyond just plumbing; he concentrates on maximizing bandwidth, optimizing application and WAN performance; he troubleshoots a network that must accommodate voice and video traffic. The new networking pro realizes that he isn’t operating in a silo, but must cooperate (and, increasingly, share responsibilities and tools) with the security, voice, and data center staff.

Last week, two of the major network vendors — Cisco and Juniper — launched new switch offerings that are very much attuned to the “new” network pro.

Cisco’s Nexus 7000 super-switch may sound like it’s all about increased throughput, but perhaps the greater benefit, one which appeals to our new network pro, is that it is designed to eliminate redundant connectivity by allowing for converged Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks. And Cisco’s strategy, according to Doug Gourlay, senior director of marketing for Data Center Solutions at Cisco, is all about new network trends like convergence and virtualization (as quoted from an article by Shamus McGillicuddy).

Gourlay said Cisco has recognized several drivers that are leading higher-density data centers to turn to the network for help in improving operations. First is a “new class” of applications, such as voice and video, which consume significantly more bandwidth. The second driver is server virtualization. When you consolidate 10 virtual servers onto one physical server, that single box now deals with the aggregate bandwidth demands of the 10 servers. The third driver is Input-Output consolidation.

Similarly, Juniper’s new switches — the EX 3200, the EX 4200 and the EX 8200 — appeal to the network performance-minded enterprise, with their emphasis on uptime and reliability. As quoted in an article by Michael Morisy, Eddie Minkill, executive vice president of Juniper’s worldwide field operations, says that the view of the network as “plumbing” is outdated because consumers and businesses expect instant responses and more and more communications are carried through IP.

So the vendors and the pundits have their ducks in a row, but I wonder whether real-world network pros are getting in line. Surely these new switch offerings bode well for network reliability and productivity — but whenever I talk to actual people who are down in the IT trenches, I hear again and again that a) they would like to implement new technology, but instead spend more time keeping old stuff running and b) they don’t have time to think about anything besides putting out fires. (Maybe disgruntled IT pros are more verbal about this stuff.)

This skepticism isn’t unique. In the same article about Juniper’s new switch, Morisy writes that Jim Metzler, vice president of Sanibel, Fla.-based consultancy Ashton, Metzler & Associates, was doubtful about the current market for the powerful switch:

“I don’t know who they are going to appeal to,” he said, adding that most enterprises are not prioritizing carrier-grade robustness and millisecond latency. A few major exceptions exist, particularly in the financial sector, but he disagreed with the assertion that enterprises see the difference between 5 and 4 9’s of uptime as a critical tool in keeping customers.

“Is it good technology? Absolutely,” Metzler said. The problem is that people will not switch simply to use good technology, or even better technology, when what they have works, and Metzler said Juniper has found a solution for a problem people do not currently have. If the EX Series is to become a success, he said, a better marketing strategy must be implemented that could focus on cost reduction or other, more enterprise-focused problems.

Ultimately, I think that defining the network pro according to any stereotype is going to prove inaccurate, but the successful IT person may be the one who can look beyond their departmental silo and embrace “new” networking concepts like mobility and application performance. For that to happen, though, network pros may have to find a way to prevent those fires from happening in the first place.

Cisco’s new CTO

Cisco announced tonight that it has a new CTO. She is a woman, and she has one of the coolest names on the planet: Padmasree Warrior. Warrior was formerly CTO of Motorola. She worked at Motorola for 23 years, and, when named CTO in January 2003, became Motorola’s first female executive vice president.

Warrior was the creator of the Motorola-hosted blog, “Bits at the Edge,” which was unfortunately but understandably shut off at her resignation this week. The blog was extremely insightful and read avidly by technology enthusiasts around the globe. In it, Warrior examined technical innovations from sometimes surprising angles and mused about the effects they would have on their respective industries and on the people who used them.

Cisco is a smart company and already has a blog post up from Warrior in its heretofore lackluster corporate blog, The Platform. She writes a fairly generic welcome piece about how Cisco is poised to take on “the next wave of Internet evolution” and she is happy to be joining them. Let’s hope that she’s just testing the waters and that Cisco provides her with a true “platform” and free rein to explore and interact with users and customers about issues and concerns that really matter to them.

Cisco networking bookshelf bonanza!

Maybe you are hoping to catch up on some networking know-how before the new year… or perhaps you could use a free gift for that special geek on your holiday gift list. Either way, I’d like to help. Thanks to the friendly elves at Cisco Press, we have a big stack of networking books to give away! Here are a few examples:

• CCNP BSCI Portable Command Guide by Scott Empson
• CCNA Portable Command Guide second edition by Scott Empson
• LAN Switch Security: What Hackers Know About Your Switches by Eric Vyncke and Christopher Paggen, CCIE No. 2659
• End-to-End Network Security: Defense-in-Depth by Omar Santos

If you’d like a chance to win one of these books, all you need to do is comment on this post and tell us the number one networking issue you’d like to learn more about in 2008, and post your comment before 8:00 a.m. EST December 10. Don’t forget to include an email address where we can reach you (and you can email us separately if you are worried about spammers, but don’t forget to include your ITKE ID so we’ll know you posted)! We’ll pick winners at random and keep sending books (chosen at random) ’til we run out. (Unfortunately, we can only ship within the U.S., but we’d still like to hear from our international readers.)

We can’t guarantee you’ll get the book before Dec. 25, but we’ll do our best.  Good luck, and thanks in advance for your input!

Cisco targeting digital signage, advertising

The first time I talked to Cisco about the networking vendor’s foray into digital signage, I was a bit confused. Why would the largest enterprise networking vendor want to jump into an area targeted at consumers, especially something as futuristic as digital signage, which boils down to essentially an electronic or digital advertising screen like you would see in Times Square, displaying video content that can be changed on the fly without physically changing the sign itself? It’s similar to something seen in Minority Report or Back to the Future II.

For example, digital images could be changed depending on the consumers who are in close proximity to the sign. So, if you’re attending a punk rock convention, digital signs in the area could feature a mohawked teen snarling at you to promote a certain product, event or service. Similarly, say that same convention center hosts a video game convention, those signs could quickly, easily and cheaply be switched up to feature Ms. Pac Man or Link staring you in the face. Those advertisements would be sent to the sign via IP video.

To me, it sounded like a deviation from Cisco’s core competence of routing and switching.

But recently I had a chat with Rick Sizemore, chief strategy officer for MultiMedia Intelligence for a SearchNetworking.com story. Sizemore, an expert on digital signage and other next generation mediums, broke it down for me. He pointed to several strategic moves Cisco has made in the IP video arena that, coupled with Cisco’s networking expertise, makes the vendor a top competitor in the digital signage and interactive advertising spaces.

I’m not exactly sure how companies are going to leverage all of this next-generation technology, or how Cisco is going to build on its digital signage and IP video plans to make it a viable revenue-generating medium for those companies. But if Sizemore’s discoveries and predictions ring true, which they have so far, it won’t be long before we’re greeted in an airport or a shopping mall with advertising and signage that can target us specifically.