Cisco quietly downsizing through outsourcing

CiscoWhen Cisco celebrated the fifth anniversary of its New England Development Center in Boxborough, Mass., last fall – a ceremony attended by Massachusetts Congresswoman Niki Tsongas and a representative from Gov. Deval Patrick’s office – the company was quietly preparing to move several jobs from there and other locations to contractors in India and elsewhere, mostly in the company’s Network Management Technology Group (NMTG).

In Cisco parlance, a “limited restructuring” was underway, under the radar.

These “LRs,” as Cisco sources call them, are a way for the company to cut costs by reducing workforce in small, incremental moves without having to publicly announce or disclose the actions in compliance with U.S. Department of Labor regulations, like the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN). These specific NMTG LRs are separate from the planned reduction of 1,500 to 2,000 positions Cisco announced during its earnings call last month, which, the company says, complied fully with WARN and other federal labor regulations.

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Cisco’s data-center push holds promise, perils

CiscoCisco’s move into the heart of data centers, expected to be laid out at an event next Monday, holds the promise of easing a big IT headache but may also escalate competition between the company and its partners.

The networking giant is widely expected to announce an entry into the blade server market, codenamed “California,” at the Monday event, though the company’s brief press invitation referred only to a concept Cisco calls “Unified Computing.” In a recent blog posting, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior described Unified Computing as a move toward unifying computing and storage platforms with networks and virtualization platforms. She also acknowledged Cisco will compete with some of its partners.

What Cisco wants to do, according to industry analysts, is to make virtualization easier — and gain a lot more control over virtualization itself. That goal doesn’t necessarily require the company to make its own servers, but some signals point in that direction.

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Arbor Networks bolsters Internet monitoring system

Arbor NetworksNew ATLAS system promises real-time data on security, routing and traffic trends.

Network security vendor Arbor Networks is collaborating with more than 100 ISPs worldwide to create a more comprehensive Internet monitoring system.

The newly enhanced ‘Net monitoring system, dubbed ATLAS 2.0 by Arbor Networks, now monitors and collects real-time data for global Internet traffic, routing and application performance. Previously, Arbor says the ATLAS system had been used mostly to collect data on security-related traffic such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack traffic.

Arbor decided to expand its ATLAS system to more general Internet monitoring to help its client ISPs gather more business intelligence on the traffic and application trends that guide service providers’ business decisions.

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Juniper introduces Adaptive Threat Management

JuniperJuniper is this week introducing software that lets security platforms – even those made by other vendors – share and analyze log information in order to determine the root cause of network problems and fix them.

Called Adaptive Threat Management, the data-sharing software includes upgrades to its SSL VPN and Unified Access Control  devices that enable them to publish log information to a UAC server that shares the data with other platforms.

The interface between the SSL and UAC devices and the server is a standard known as IF-MAP, a communication interface for creating a two-way street between network devices and the server to which device data is published.

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CeBIT 2009: The event in images

Raw images from CeBIT 2009 in Hanover. Below you can find a series of photos from what I saw interesting at CeBIT. I spent 2 full days there and I tried to see everything but, even so, the time was quite limited. In my personal opinion the event was a success, with plenty of visitors and exhibitors (about 4300 companies from 69 countries), despite all the rumors about it being compromised by economical crisis (as this is my fist year when I was present to this event I cannot compare it with previous editions).

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