Cisco : IP Vision In This Convergent World

With this acquisition, Cisco muscles into the STB market, and gearing to get into the home networking as well. There is now no competitor with matching reach and skill base like Cisco. Cisco already has great Storage Networking technology in-house, modulating and re-aligning may be a challenge, but reality is that in this changing digital life, consumers would want to view, listen, communicate over varied mediums covering almsot all digital gadgetries at home as well.The services can be extended to support a lot more features. The STB segment is a very important niche, with potential to grow manifold times in the coming years & Cisco has certainly done a great job in identiifying the space and is all set to become a significant player here. As News.com captured it so well - for a long time Cisco has been talking about network convergence, the idea that data, voice and video traffic will one day travel over a single network. The vision has already come to fruition within the carrier's network. Most cable operators and phone companies carry their internal traffic over an Internet protocol, or IP, network that uses Cisco routing and switching equipment. Now the trend is finally making its way into the home, as cable companies and phone companies start offering customers a triple play of services that includes high-speed Internet access, telephony and, finally, video-all over an IP network. We covered Geoffrey Moore's View on Cisco's future from his perspective where he rightly predicted that the options for Cisco as:

Cisco- integrate the network to transform it into a platform for web ervices
- enter systems management beginning with security
- annex enterprise storage
- use visionary consulting to influence the emerging architecture
Geff Moore writes that Linksys One is an appliance-like offer that will be resold through telecommunication service providers (SPs), both traditional and non-traditional, as a hosted service. This does not require Cisco to develop deep SP expertise, and it gives it a leveraged entrée into the small business market through a channel that is already a trusted source of services. Moreover it brings to market a next-generation platform from which one can readily envision launching a broad array of services. Meanwhile, its acquisition of Scientific Atlantic gives it’s a second SP play—by resurrecting the CLEC vs. ILEC play. Only this time the C in CLEC stands for Cable-enabled. The ILECs are still deeply engaged with the traditional telecom switch providers—Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, Seimens, Ericsson—and while the company will no doubt continue to knock on those doors, the exercise is a bit like pushing a rope uphill. The cable folks, on the other hand, are absolutely delighted to get help with their own version of the voice/data/video triple play. What Scientific Atlantic brings to the table is the possibility of an end-to-end platform play with Cisco controlling both ends. As we noted earlier, much of Cisco’s growth has come through acquisitions, almost 100 in its decade of existence. But this one stands apart – for the size and the new terrain that it leads Cisco into.