Cisco 'Think inside the box' contest winners

By David Heath
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:02

Development

Cisco's contest to promote innovation based on the concept of the network as a platform has been decided.  $US50,000 to the winner!

The contest to leverage the Cisco AXP platform commenced almost exactly a year ago; the results were announced late last week.  Entrants could either be individuals or teams of up to three people.  At the close of the competition, nearly 900 registrations had been received from 75 countries resulting in 110 validated entries.

According to the 'terms and conditions,' the entry should be a "Linux-based solution for the Cisco Application Extension Platform."  Only second-phase entries were required to submit a prototype of the solution.

Although Cisco devices with AXP run the normal Cisco IOS for  routing tasks, "AXP is a Linux blade that runs in the Cisco integrated services router and allows third-party applications to be tightly integrated with the router using APIs. AXP provides an application hosting infrastructure that affords Cisco integrated services router customers the opportunity to run all or portions of their branch applications on an integrated services router service module. The AXP will also be available to commercial application vendors and customers as a new platform capable of running their applications inside of an integrated services router, rather than on a traditional standalone server. AXP provides a powerful platform to create complete solutions with the integrated services router."

During phase one, entrants were judged against the criteria of Innovation (35%), Leveraging the AXP Platform (35%), Feasibility (20%) and Project Plan & Documentation (10%).  Of the many submissions, ten proposals were selected for phase 2.

In the second phase, all implementations were evaluated by a panel of experts from Cisco and other reputable organisations.  In this phase, they were evaluated for Functionality Coverage (30%), Architecture (35%), Demonstration of Product Capabilities (30%) and Documentation (5%). 

Further details of all criteria are available on the competition website.

Read on for the winning entries.