Cisco Intros Branch Solution Amid Restructuring, Financial News

Sandwiched between announcing a major restructuring and reporting its latest quarterly financial results, Cisco unveiled new cloud initiatives at Interop that were originally scheduled to debut a month earlier (on April 19) as part of a major Borderless Networks update.

The Cisco Flex 7500 Series Cloud Controller is a scalable branch controller for multisite wireless deployments that enables central management and control of up to 500 branch locations, 2,000 access points and over 20,000 clients from a single data center, while enabling remote policy configuration, management and security. Also new is the Cisco ISR Cloud Web Security with Cisco ScanSafe, which extends ScanSafe Cloud Web Security to branch offices by providing scalable, centralized web protection and malware detection on the ISR G2 branch router.

Available now, the Cisco Flex 7500 Series Cloud Controller starts at $47,995 list price, while the Cisco ISR Web Security with Cisco Scansafe, due out in July, is part of any ISR G2 security bundle and starts at $2,495. A subscription to the Cisco ScanSafe service is also required, priced per user per year.

On May 5, Cisco announced it would streamline its sales, services and engineering organizations, with most of the changes to be made during the next 120 days. The company will focus on five areas: core routing, switching and services; collaboration; data center virtualization and cloud; video; and architectures for business transformation. Reports state that Cisco is looking to cut expenses by $1 billion and could reduce its workforce of over 70,000 employees by 4,000 to 5,000.

Just under a week later, on May 11, Cisco announced fiscal third quarter net income of $1.8 billion on net sales of $10.9 billion. Chairman and CEO John Chambers said that the company has acknowledged its challenges: "We know what we have to do. We have a clear game plan, and we are a company with a track record of market-shaping innovation," he said in a statement.Bass Pro Shops, which has 56 retail stores in the United States and Canada, states that it looked to the new Flex controller to reduce costs by eliminating the need for a controller at each store to manage the wireless networks, while also reducing the amount of interaction needed by store personnel. "At Bass Pro Shops, we were looking to centralize the management of wireless connections in our corporate headquarters, distribution facility and our retail stores, which each rely on wireless connectivity for handheld scanners, phones and printers," says Steve Marshall, director of IT services, Bass Pro Shops.

The new product announcements support Cisco's ongoing recognition that the control point for IT is no longer end devices, and that IT has to move security and policies from user devices to ports (wireless, remote and wired), says Andre Kindness, senior analyst, Forrester Research: "Smartphones, tablets and millennium users are forcing this to happen. It is good Cisco is combining management of devices and users, whether wired or wireless, under one umbrella. It's the right direction, but HP's ProCurve line has had that capability with ProCurve Manager and Identity Driven Manager for a few years."

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