May 14th, 2013

Study: 57% Of Consumers Worldwide Say They Would Trust Driverless Cars, 46% Would Let Their Kids Ride In Them

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Cisco today announced the results of its study into consumer’s thoughts about connected and driverless cars. While a large part of the study focused on the role of technology in the car shopping experience (unsurprisingly, nobody likes car dealerships), the study also looked into drivers’ attitudes about driverless cars. Surprisingly, 57% of all of the respondents said that they would… → Read More

April 3rd, 2013

Cisco’s Lew Tucker On The Internet Of Everything And The Tie To An App-Centric World

DeGoes_bigdata

Cisco’s Lew Tucker stood onstage today at Cloud Connect and pitched the networking giant’s “Internet of Everything,” an app-centric world that will be worth $14.5 trillion over the next couple of years. Whereas the Internet of Things is all the objects in our world, Tucker says the IoE is the smart grids and, really, the entire supply chain and its transformation. Big… → Read More

April 3rd, 2013

Cisco Is Buying Ubiquisys For $310M For A Big Move Into Mobile Coverage With Femtocells And Small Cells

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Cisco has just announced that it is buying UK-based Ubiquisys for $310 million to beef up its business in femtocells and small cells, technologies that help improve connectivity on mobile data networks indoors and short-range outdoor spaces. The deal is one of the biggest exits in European tech in the last several years. → Read More

March 4th, 2013

Brain Drain At Skype? Tech Leader Jonathan Rosenberg Latest To Leave, Now At Cisco As CTO, Cloud Collaboration

skype

There is some change at Skype, the messaging giant that is now a part of Microsoft: Jonathan Rosenberg, the chief technology strategist, and then later GM of product strategy and research at Microsoft who was behind the creation of Skype’s Facebook video calling feature and other developments, has left the company to become a VP and CTO of cloud collaboration for Cisco — the company from which→ Read More

February 12th, 2013

Pertino Offers A Cloud-Based Network, No Hardware Required

Pertino

Pertino today launched a service enabling any small business to go online and create a network that runs entirely in the cloud.

Pertino uses Amazon Web Service (AWS) for its service making it possible for a business of any size to create secure networks. It connects people anywhere in a manner that not long ago would have cost a small fortune in networking gear. It does this by integrating its… → Read More

February 8th, 2013

Big Switch Raises $6.5M From Intel Capital, Gains Attention For Next Generation Networking, Challenges Cisco

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Big Switch Networks, the software defined networking company making a play on Cisco’s turf, has raised $6.5 million from Intel Capital. he investment brings the total amount raised to $45 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and others. → Read More

January 29th, 2013

On An International Buying Campaign, Cisco Acquires Cyber Threat Protection Startup Cognitive Security

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Today, it seems that Cisco’s international buying spree continues. acquisition of Israeli mobile startup, Intucell, for $475 million in cash last week, the company announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Czech network security startup, Cognitive Security. The terms of the acquisition were not made public.

In its announcement today, Cisco said that it will be combining the startup’s… → Read More

January 25th, 2013

Cisco Leaves The Consumer Networking Market After Selling Linksys Brand To Belkin

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It’s been a weird decade for Cisco. After being a dot-com darling in the late 90s (everyone wanted a few Cisco routers for their door-to-door pet food delivery services), the company tried its hand at consumer products with the Flip video camera series and, a little while later, Linksys routers. It seems, then, that Cisco’s grand consumer experiment is over. → Read More

January 23rd, 2013

Cisco To Buy Israeli Mobile Startup Intucell For $475 Million Cash, And Bessemer Will Get Nearly Half

Cisco Intucell

Bessemer Venture Partners racked up a huge win today. Two years ago it invested $6 million in exchange for nearly half the equity of Israeli startup Intucell, whose networking tech lets carriers handle more mobile traffic. Today, Cisco announced plans to buy Intucell for $475 million in cash, and BVP tells me it will take nearly half that sale price. → Read More

January 4th, 2013

Cisco And NXP Throw Their Weight Behind Cohda Wireless To Bring The Internet Of Things To Your Car

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Looking backwards, the automobile of today looks almost superintelligent. While some of us may have expected (read: hoped for) the flying car by 2013 and, sure, the internal combustion engine still reigns, the majority of vehicles today are basically computers on wheels. The average car today has around 50 microprocessors, give or take. But, given how quickly automotive technology is advancing… → Read More

December 14th, 2012

Source: Cisco Takes Secretive Role As “Unnamed Silicon Valley Industry Titan” In WhipTail’s $31M Round

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According to multiple sources, Cisco has taken a secretive role as the “Unnamed Silicon Valley Titan” in a $31 million round for WhipTail, a flash storage company that also took investment from SanDisk and others.

The Series C round of funding included investment from Ignition PartnersRRE Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital. Silicon Valley Bank provided debt financing. SanDisk’s investment… → Read More

November 18th, 2012

Cisco Acquires Enterprise Wi-Fi Startup Meraki For $1.2 Billion In Cash

Cisco Acquires Meraki Done

Networking tech giant Cisco has just agreed to acquire cloud infrastructure startup Meraki, and my industry sources confirm the purchase price was $1.2 billion, all in cash. I’ve also gotten ahold of the letter to Meraki employees from CEO Sanjit Biswas. It’s a huge win for the 330 employee San Francisco startup. [Update: The PR just hit the wire, confirming our details on the acquisition and… → Read More

November 15th, 2012

Cisco Acquires Cloud Management Company Cloupia For $125 Million

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Cisco has announced it plans to acquire Cloupia for $125 million. The software company helps customers automate their data centers.

Cisco sees Cloupia’s infrastructure management software enhancing its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching portfolio. Cisco expects Cloupia will help better manage the automation of compute, network and storage as well as virtual machine… → Read More

September 26th, 2012

Cisco Acquires Wi-Fi Location Data Analytics Startup ThinkSmart

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Cisco has made an interesting acquisition today, announcing the purchase of ThinkSmart Technologies, a company that delivers location data analysis using Wi-Fi technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ThinkSmart’s technology enhances a wireless network infrastructure with location analytics for service provider and enterprise customers. The startup’s location analytics… → Read More

August 27th, 2012

VMware Gets A New Boss – Paul Maritz Turns Over Job To EMC COO Pat Gelsinger

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Paul Maritz turned over the job of VMware CEO to EMC’s COO Pat Gelsinger on stage at VMworld today.  It’s a move long expected that tells us more about the company’s future direction as it moves into new territory beyond its enterprise kingdom.

There are battles ahead with the likes of Cisco, trust to gain and lose with the open source community. Gelsinger will now have to lead the evolution… → Read More

August 15th, 2012

Cisco Beats Fourth Quarter Analyst Expectations of 45 Cents Per Share – Revenues Up 4%

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Cisco beat fourth quater analyst expectations with net sales up 4% compared to last year.  Overall revenues were $11.7 billion with reporting of 47 cents per share. For the year, net sales were $46.1 billion , up 7% compared to last year.

Analysts had forecast a profit of 45 cents a share, on revenue of $11.62 billion, according to FactSet. → Read More

August 9th, 2012

Principal Mozilla Engineer Mike Hanson Departs, Joins Greylock As EIR

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Greylock Partners announced tonight that it has added a new member to its team, with Mike Hanson joining the firm this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Hanson joins Greylock from Mozilla, where he has been a principal engineer at Mozilla Labs for the last three years, playing a central role in conceiving the company’s distributed identity verification system, also known as BrowserID, and… → Read More

August 7th, 2012

PLUMgrid Raises $10.7 Million With Goal To Become The New Platform For Networking

PLUMgrid

PLUMgrid has raised $10.7 million in Series A funding from Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners to build an operating system that serves the network as much as the modern x86 processor is the foundation for the compute power we use every day to run our applications.

The network is becoming a sort of holy grail. We’ve figured out the compute. You can buy a cheap box and with an x86 processor… → Read More

July 26th, 2012

Cisco Touts Its Cloudy Open Future – Will VMware Do The Same?

openstack

Lew Tucker is the distinguished Cloud CTO for Cisco Systems. He’s a revered character in the “clouderati,” community for his clear views and his support for OpenStack, the open cloud effort that is getting a lot of attention these past few weeks.

He’s also a proponent of open source. In this video, he says open source is an increasing part of Cisco’s future. It’s a way to give back to the… → Read More

July 8th, 2012

Track Record In China Sets Cisco’s “TOS” Scandal In A More Sinister Light

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Cisco did some apologizing this past week. The networking giant apologized for all the confusion about Cisco Connect Cloud and the suspect terms of service that many people viewed as a way for the company to monitor behavior and potentially cut off their router if they infringed.

Cisco Connect Cloud is a service that updates a router automatically for customers. It’s part of Cisco’s effort to… → Read More

March 15th, 2012

Updated: Cisco To Buy Interactive TV And Security Specialist NDS In $5B Deal

NDS tablet user

Yesterday I wrote about how Israel is trying to promote itself as the next hotbed of consumer and Internet startups, moving beyond its traditional roots in “hard” technology. But today comes news of a deal that is firmly about its existing might in the latter category: Cisco is reported to be gearing up to purchase interactive TV and security specialist NDS, founded in Israel in 1988, for a sum… → Read More

February 15th, 2012

Cisco’s Mood Message: Not Happy With Microsoft/Skype Deal; Appealing To EU

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As one big tech merger gets approved by the EU, another might get kicked back into play. Today, Cisco launched an appeal against the purchase of Skype by Microsoft, a deal that was originally unconditionally approved by the regulators back in October 2011. → Read More

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February 14th, 2012

TheNumberOfMobileDevicesWillExceedWorld’sPopulationBy2012(&OtherShockingFigures)

Despite its long and boring name, Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update” is one of the more fascinating data-filled reports you’ll read this year. The report examines the dramatic growth we’re seeing in the mobile Internet space, including the massive demands for mobile data, the growth of mobile video, and the rise of the smartphone as new gateway to… → Read More

August 29th, 2011

Cisco Acquires Collaboration Software Maker Versly

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Cisco this morning announced that it has acquired San Francisco startup Versly, a privately-held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all Versly employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group (CSG) upon the close of the acquisition. → Read More

August 22nd, 2011

Cisco To Buy Comptel’s Axioss Software Assets For $31 Million In Cash

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Cisco this morning announced its intent to purchase service fulfillment software assets and associated employees from the UK subsidiary of partner company Comptel, for 21.3 million euros or roughly $31 million in cash.

With the acquisition, Cisco hopes to extend network and service management technologies across its IP-based network platforms and enable service providers to more quickly launch… → Read More

July 15th, 2011

The Cisco Cius Enterprise Tablet Hitting Verizon Later This Summer

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The Cisco Cius tablet is nearing release a full year after its announcement. The enterprise tablet is set to set the IT world a blaze this July 31 and Verizon will be one of the official retailers along with AT&T. The $750 tablet will hit Big Red sometime this summer; the press release didn’t confirm or even mention the July 31st date. Instead, the presser states that the tablet is coming late… → Read More

July 1st, 2011

It's A Pretty Big Ship: HP Isn't After Apple, It's After The Enterprise

Loopinsight has an interview with HP’s developer relations guy, Richard Kerris, where he basically says that WebOS is HP’s enterprise strategy, not their consumer play. He says:

“We think there’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to… → Read More

June 29th, 2011

Cisco Brings AppHQ App Storefront To It's 7-Inch Cius Tablet

A year ago today, we predicted that Cisco’s enterprise-focused 7-inch Cius tablet would never ship. It was a reasonable prediction at the time, but it turns out we were wrong. In fact, the Cisco Cius tablet did ship in late March, barely making its promised release date of “Q1 2011.” Today, Cisco unveiled its latest product for Cius, the AppHQ application storefront, hoping to gain a little… → Read More

June 20th, 2011

iControl Lands Over $50 Million For Broadband Home Management Software

iControl Networks, a provider of broadband home management software solutions, this morning announced that it has raised over $50 million in Series D funding, bringing total investment in the company to more than $100 million.

The round was led by energy and clean tech investors, with notable backers like Cisco, Comcast Ventures, Intel Capital, Charles River Ventures, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield… → Read More

May 11th, 2011

AT&T To Sell The Cisco Cius

Remember a few months ago when you kind of cared about the Cisco Cius and then you realized it was just a little screen made for video meetings and wasn’t really a consumer device? Well, prepare for that realization again because AT&T is about to provide HSPA+ data service for this thing and presumably sell it to government and institutional buyers. → Read More