Category: Cisco

Cisco said it will acquire ClearAccess, which provides provisioning and management software for providers.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

ClearAccess provides provisioning software for residential and mobile devices as well as hardware. Cisco said ClearAccess’ hardware business dubbed Smart RG Gateways will continue. ClearAccess has a suite of network management tools to monitor and analyze broadband consumption. The company also tools to manage connected homes. The flagship product from ClearAccess is ClearVision. The company also provides content filtering, managed Wi-Fi and firewall services and time blocking.

The deal bolsters Cisco’s service provider business. The networking giant said it will take ClearAccess’ management software and augment Cisco Prime, its network management software.

Employees at ClearAccess will merge into Cisco’s network management group.

Cisco said the deal will close in the fiscal fourth quarter.

Running the internal IT operations of Cisco Systems (CSCO) is a big job not just because of the size of the company — more than 70,000 employees worldwide and a market capitalization in the range of US$100 billion — but also because Cisco is continually developing new IT products across a broad range of technologies and is known for rapidly adopting those products for its own use. Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby spoke with IDG News Service on the sidelines of the NetWork conference last week and shared some insights into the legendary enterprise IT company’s own enterprise IT.
IDGNS: What is the scope of Cisco’s IT operations?

Jacoby: We’re headquartered in San Jose, but less than 50 percent of the IT organization is located in California. A large percentage is in Bangalore. I also have about the same amount in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we have a substantial number of employees in a couple of sites in Europe, and a few in Shanghai. We service most of the globe mostly from those sites, but there are also a number of employees that are distributed globally to various places. It’s a little bit over 3,100 employees that are Cisco employees. Depending on what initiatives are going on, we employ probably 6,000 to 8,000 employees [from outside Cisco].

IDGNS: What’s the best way for an enterprise to manage employees’ mobile devices?
Jacoby: We went through this as a big question … a couple of years ago. What we’ve learned is that if you give them no choice whatsoever, that isn’t what works for people. We need to be able to give the individuals choice. And to do that, you have to take a shared responsibility to how you address the total cost of ownership of these devices. We actually have applied a certain amount of that cost to the individual, where they’re making certain types of choices, but we absorb a certain amount of it within the company as well, in terms of support costs and those types of things.

IDGNS: How do you get employees to use new technologies such as Cisco’s Quad collaboration platform?

Jacoby: It’s sort of an interesting dynamic in our company, and I think this is true in most forward-thinking companies: I have more of a challenge in terms of getting it to scale to the level people want to use it, versus getting people to use it.

Cisco Systems posted year-over-year gains in revenue and profit for its fiscal second quarter on Wednesday, reporting net sales up 10.8 percent to US$11.5 billion, and said it met a key cost-cutting goal one quarter early.

Cisco earned $0.40 per share according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), up more than 48 percent from the second quarter of 2011. Its non-GAAP profit was $0.47 per share, beating the estimate of $0.43 from analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. The analysts had forecast sales of $11.23 billion.

“We are executing well on our three-year plan to drive earnings faster than revenue,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said in a press release. “We hit our billion-dollar expense reduction a quarter early,” he added.

Wednesday’s report covered the second quarter of the company’s three-year plan to improve profits, which was laid out at its 2011 financial analyst conference in September. Cisco kicked off the effort after slumping results triggered a 150-day reorganization last year. Among other changes, a company structure based on a set of councils was replaced with a more traditional organization.

Cisco slowed down its usually aggressive acquisition activity during the slump but is now back in the game, Chambers said. The company’s ideal buyout target remains the same as before, he said: a company with about 100 engineers and a product about to come to market. It especially likes companies when Cisco’s customers recommend the acquisition.
The company’s UCS (Unified Computing System) server lineup grew significantly in the second quarter, with revenue up 91 percent from a year earlier and an accumulated customer count of 10,763. With both these servers and the Nexus line of switches, Cisco expects to gain ground in data centers because of virtualization and cloud strategies, Chambers said. The line will blur between servers, networks and storage, which Cisco is addressing through its partnership with EMC and VMware, Chambers said. Overall data-center revenue was up 88 percent.

Routing and switching revenue also grew, though each by only 8 percent. Revenue from service-provider video infrastructure, another key focus at Cisco, grew 23 percent.
Cisco’s product orders grew 5 percent in the Americas; 7 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and 14 percent in Asia-Pacific, including Japan. While orders for enterprise and commercial products each rose 7 percent, and service-provider orders jumped 12 percent, public-sector ordering fell 1 percent amid budget cuts, especially in the U.S., Chambers said.

For the current quarter, Cisco forecast revenue growth of 5 percent to 7 percent and non-GAAP earnings of $0.45 to $0.47 per share.