Cisco kicks off Borderless Networks push with new Integrated Services Router

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 20 October 2009 17:00

IT Industry - Strategy

"The trend is that companies need to get more customers and deliver a better experience and lower costs at the same time." He cites IDC research indicating that user interactions have increased eight fold but IT staff numbers by only 10 percent. A study by Nemertes Research, commissioned by Cisco, sees the number of branches of large organisations growing 17 percent by 2010.

"The trends we are seeing mean we need to use things like video and rich media to improve customer experience and drive loyalty and retention," Van Hoof said. "The third requirement is to do all this and drive down costs. CIOs add that at the end of the conversation!"

There was, he said a very powerful argument for service virtualisation - being able to add and configure new services on the ISR remotely without the need for site visit by a technician. "Large financial organisations estimate it costs $1000 per branch to do anything - by the time they organise security and access out of hours. If they have 1000 branches that's $1 million. That's a bad start to getting any return on investment."

The new ISRs will come with a number of hardware options, which Van Hoof said could be installed by unskilled personnel and then remotely configured and brought online, but Cisco's expectation is that customers will purchase hardware configured in anticipation of future requirements. "Because we have separated the costs of hardware and software and done what we can to keep hardware a low cost item I think there will be a strong tendency to pre-provision," he said.

Van Hoof said the energy management features had also been enhanced considerably since the first generation. "The router can be aware of energy use across the organisation. It can shut down DSPs and WLAN controllers. we have taken it so far that we can get a 55 to 60 percent reduction in energy use. It can get to a state where you are only running the motherboard and the controller...With very simple policy management so it easy to set up and run."

Cisco has, according o van Hoof, made "a complete product refresh" of the ISR product line with the announcement of 19xx 29xx and 39xxx series of products. The 29xx and 39xx serries are immediately available and the 19xx will be in November. Van Hoof added that current products are not being phased out at present and that 90 percent of the devices and modules for the current ISR product range can be used in the new products.