Reposting this from the JNPR thread:
Message 17233532
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Hi Ibexx,
Sure, I'd be glad to. From the passage that you cited:
"Cisco is no doubt the top vendor for enterprise networking. However, the company has understood little of telecom. They purchased the following.."
I can't speak to the motives, or secondary damages or benefits (you can take that anyway you wish ;) of every acquisition that Cisco has made over the years. Nor can I say if any of those purchases had any bearing at all on the author's argument concerning where Cisco is going in telecoms.
As for Cisco's adeptness to navigate in the space traditionally held by the incumbent telecoms equipment vendors, I think that one has to take a multi-dimensional view of this, and step back for a moment and witness evolution in the making. (This evolution thing does keep sticking its head up, doesn't it? ;)
Imo, it's correct to say that they have not done well on a one-for-one, like-architecture basis taking traditional telecom market share from LU and NT. Where, the latter two still dominate both the central office (Class 5 and other CO switches) and enterprise telecom closet spaces (circuit-switched PBX and desktop telephone sets, audio-visual, etc.), collectively representing several very large markets.
On the other hand, Cisco and others in the IP-centric space have already sized up the "service" angle of "telecoms" and are in the process of slowly displacing PBXs, desktop phones, and the overall direction where voice is headed both now, in some cases, and in the not-too-distant future, as enhancements to their wares are refined. (And yes, there is still some room for refinements;)
Note: there are many others who have come into the VoIP space with a vengeance, so I'm not limiting this post to Cisco, alone. Although, from what I can see they are certainly enjoying a large number of wins in the very large enterprise space, and this is due to several reasons. One, their entrenchment in the LAN and WAN spaces where Ethernet and IP, respectively, have become the standard of the day. And, Two, the mandate that has been issued to - and sometimes even the desire by ;) - enterprise engineers to keep their LAN/MAN/WAN architectures consistent, throughout. Of course, there are other reasons stemming from features, quality, etc., but the two that I've listed above, by and large, are the dominant ones.
Here, on the distribution side to the desk, they and the other upstarts in this space have the advantage of offering a single switch (the 10/100 Ethernet LAN switch for now, and GbE to the desk down a short road) to handle both voice and data (and video when the network is properly engineered) over two pairs of Cat 5 or better, instead of using 4 or more pairs of varying grades. A big administrative and cost advantage in itself. And we are already seeing instances of VoIP and multimedia over wireless in the workplace, as well.
[[I'm currently overseeing certain aspects of a corporate campus project where four thousand desks are being outfitted with voip gear, througout. All I can say is that I've been very pleasantly suprised with both the quality (better than normal clarity, much higher-fidelity, in fact) and the list of features it supports. But now I digress.]]
Once a beach head is established in the local telecom closet for voice services, the implications stretch far beyond the enterprise's commercial building quarters and into the local transport and WAN markets. Newer forms of IP pathways will eventually supplant the ISDN PRI circuits that are usually supported by the Class 5s, for example, in favor of some newer form of softswitch fabric that can accept GbE feeds instead, or some other IP-based alternative.
At that point, the ILEC is either relegated irrelevant, theoretically, at least from a POTS perspective, or they are forced to change their ways - and possibly, their vendors, as well. Keep in mind that when voice is suddenly sent to the cloud [PSTN] via IP over GbE, as I just alluded to above, it means a radical reduction, or total erradication in some cases, of the ILECs' traditional bread and butter access lines, as well. Is it any wonder, then, why the ILECs have been rather sluggish, shall we say, about getting their GbE offerings out the door? I should add at this point that voice sent to softswitch fabrics is already being done, big time, by the likes of Level3 and others who are doing dialup modem offload for AOL and others. So, it's not a matter of if, but when, it will find its way into the mainstream. Are the carriers who have the critical mass of subscribers (scale) necessary to make it work actually interested? Only if they are pushed to the wall, IMO.
In contemplating whether to compete with the legacy vendors' architectures and products, where they would have little chance, the VoIP vendors are changing the very architectures and product definitions that will be used to satisfy the same "services," instead, and in this space they are beating the legacy players at their own game in the enterprise telecom closet for now.
In the central office zone? It's still open territory, from what I can see, where NT has had a number of wins, and I'm sure LU has as well, but where some of the upstarts are making remarkable headway, too. So it's wait and see here.
While the upstarts in this space may not have a System75/G3 PBX or a DMS100 Class5 switch that they are keeping under wraps until the right moment, they certainly have been hard at work perfecting the evolutionary path that will lead to their replacements. Comments, corrections welcome.
FAC |
