My friend from Csco sent me this . i m sure u know ..csco wants to be in your home !
Cisco's Plan to Pop Up in Your Home
The company whose products power the Net is looking for new
territory to conquer. Its next push: the wired household.
It's 6 a.m., and you've just popped a mug of water
into the microwave for tea. While you wait for it to
boil, you check up-to-the-minute stock quotes--from
the front panel of your Internet-connected
microwave.
Lunacy? Cisco Systems would have you believe it's
a likelihood. The company whose networking gear
powers 80% of the Internet backbone is looking for
new territory to conquer. It's betting that if some of
the world's toasters and televisions and
coffeemakers get wired with Cisco Networks
software, the builders of the Internet will ramp up
their purchases of Cisco's really expensive routers.
It's part of Cisco's plan to connect everyone and
everything using standard Internet protocols. If
Cisco succeeds, consumer appliances--and the
personal networking they enable--may be the
foundation for a new class of applications, making
Cisco the Microsoft of what some experts are calling
the post-PC world.
To get the word out that Cisco is serious about the
home, its chairman, John Chambers, unveiled the
plan at the beginning of January in a keynote at the
annual Las Vegas consumer extravaganza, the
Consumer Electronics Show. He even showed a
video of a net-connected microwave oven (actually
available for just $50,000 from NCR). On a perhaps
more relevant note, he also announced a deal with
AT&T and TCI, valued at slightly under $100
million. Cisco will provide the telco with equipment
to route phone, Internet, and video traffic over its
cable lines. AT&T's ads touting the service may
speak of "Cisco-powered networks."
Cisco is spreading its message via a $60 million
worldwide advertising campaign filled with
emotional pitches and multicultural children. The
company is even hitting the streets, sponsoring a
12-city shopping-mall tour with At Home Networks
to educate consumers about cable modems. Cable
modems, which are generally paid for as part of the
monthly cable service fee, are gaining popularity
because they let you bring up Web pages about 100
times faster than with the typical 28.8 phone modem
connection. "We want to make Cisco synonymous
with the Internet," says Keith Fox, Cisco's vice
president of advertising.
For now, Cisco's making a lot of fuss over a tiny
market. It gets less than $10 per license for the Cisco
Networks software. The highest-volume seller of
cable modems, Samsung, ships a mere 15,000 units
each month. But market research firm Dataquest
sees the market for connected consumer devices
growing rapidly. The firm forecasts that about six
million homes will be networked by 2002, up from a
measly total of 15,000 today.
The AT&T and Samsung deals reflect Cisco's
strategy of licensing its software to partners rather
than introducing its own products. This strategy
works, says Mark Stubbe, vice president of
Samsung's networks division in Dallas. "Working
together, we're able to get new technology and new
services out quicker than we could individually."
Despite the huge promotional push, there's less
behind the curtain than you'd think. Cisco hired a
chief for its personal networks division just this
summer, and so far she and her assistant are the
only two people in her organization. "This is a
virtual organization within an actual 17,000-person
corporation," says Robba Benjamin, vice president
and general manager of Cisco's consumer line of
business. Benjamin, formerly an executive with
Sprint and US West, has tapped a handful of people
to form a "personal networks" steering committee to
jump-start the organization. More than 100 business
development staffers and engineers are on loan for
now. Within a year Benjamin expects her group to
number between 150 and 200.
A nontechie who wanted to be a Milton scholar,
Benjamin says her top priority is to sign up home
users for broadband networking through their cable
providers, which will equip them with Cisco cable
modems made by Samsung and Sony. (These
modems are the first co-branded products available
to consumers.) So far there are only 300,000
broadband subscribers, including users of cable
modems, in the U.S., but market research firm
Forrester Research predicts that number will
mushroom to 15 million subscribers by 2002.
Cisco also plans to offer digital subscriber line (DSL)
modems, which are speedy but not as fast as cable
modems. Their main benefit? They use existing
phone lines and let you make phone calls and surf
the Web simultaneously on a single line. Eventually
a simple device dubbed a "residential gateway" will
control home electronics--from home or remotely
over the Internet.
Once all these fast connections are in place, new
applications will be built that we haven't dreamed of,
Benjamin says. No longer will you have to go back
to the kitchen to check on the progress of a roast.
Instead, digital probes will send a temperature and
time update to your personal digital assistant or
your TV.
Before we reach this futuristic nirvana, of course,
there are a couple of mundane details to take care of.
For one, how is Cisco going to connect everything
else in the home to the set-top box or cable modem?
Benjamin isn't saying, but mentions that Cisco has
invested in ShareWave, a startup making a wireless
home-networking system. She also sits on its board.
Cisco has formidable competition to outrun before it
can win this market. Nortel says that it has received
orders for $1 billion of its one-megabit cable
modems. A host of competitors--including Intel,
IBM, Lucent, and Compaq--have formed the Home
Phoneline Networking Alliance to come up with a
way to network home computers, fax machines,
stereos, and other appliances through existing
phone lines. Then there's the Bluetooth alliance,
comprising Motorola, Nokia, Intel, and others with a
similar goal of using wireless technology. Cisco
hasn't taken part in either group yet, but Benjamin
says the company wants to interoperate with both
wireless and wire-line systems.
Given all that, Cisco is wise to get into the market
now, says DavidPaul Doyle, an industry analyst
with Dataquest: "it's going to be harder to compete
once Intel, 3Com, or Bay gets entrenched in that
space." But making useful, rather than novelty,
products is the challenge, says Michael Harris,
president of Kinetics Strategics, an Internet research
firm in Phoenix. "Conceptually, Cisco can make
devices talk with each other--it does that every
day--but the challenge is to do it in a low-cost,
meaningful way," he says. Some of Cisco's ideas,
while lively and imaginative, may not fit that
criterion. Now, who really needs a
bar-code-equipped fridge that'll tell you when to
toss spoiled milk?
Magazine Issue:Vol. 139, No. 2, February 1, 1999 |
