Anthony...
Cisco's Peter Alexander, the company's director of enterprise networks is looking over his shoulder at IPSILON with their IP switching technology....
~ Mark ~
Clip from an industry article:
....Internet protocol,the system is the same one used on the Internet. The great insight of Ipsilon's founder, Tom Lyon --
who was employee No. 8 at Sun Microsystems Inc. -- is that in a
single-protocol world, traditional routers should be dinosaurs, since there's no translation left for them to do.
Impatient with industrywide efforts to come to grips with the issue, Mr. Lyon came up with a design that tossed out most of a router's
translation-oriented software and circuitry. The result is what Ipsilon calls an IP switch. Ipsilon says its IP switches cost half what routers cost, yet operate five to 10 times faster. That's because they don't need to spend time poking and prodding each message to find out how it was put together.
Ipsilon introduced its IP switches in April, and the idea quickly took the
networking world by storm. Others have since announced their own IP
switching devices, including 3Com Corp. and Ascend Communications Inc.
"Ipsilon has really struck a nerve," said Blane Erwin, of Forrester Research
Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. "The company has not only created a huge
revenue threat to Cisco, but it has also managed to accumulate a large
number of partners." Among them: Digital Equipment Corp., which has
made a $5 million equity investment in Ipsilon.
By one analyst's estimate, potentially up for grabs is about one-fifth of
Cisco's current revenue, and a quarter of its profit. "We're pursuing the
same business model that PCs pursued against minicomputers," said
Ipsilon's marketing director, Larry Blair.
Cisco is taking the threat seriously. "It's emerged as the strongest
alternative to the Cisco approach," said Peter Alexander, the company's
director of enterprise networks. But Cisco says it has a better answer. Last
month, it unveiled plans for "tag switching," a new software system that the
company says will have the benefits of traditional routing plus the speed of IP switching. |
