Cisco

Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of the digital pipes that run the Internet, is making a big play in digital entertainment. The company says it plans to introduce a new line of products in January, including a digital stereo system that is meant to move music wirelessly around a house.

With video and other rich media growing by leaps and bounds on the Internet and in corporate networks, Cisco has decided it's time to optimize. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company introduced new technologies and solutions it said will better enable "medianets" in home networks, businesses and through Internet service providers.

The company said "data-based communications are being replaced by video and rich media," and this is straining networks originally designed primarily for data.

'Immersive New Experiences'

Cisco on Tuesday announced a new router that pushes the envelope of networking technology in the "zettabyte era."

The Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series, or ASR 9000, is designed to deliver a massive-scale, nonstop video experience and a reduced carbon footprint. With its latest router, Cisco is promising to increase the speed, longevity, services, richness and efficiency of the network edge. The product seeks to answer the demand spurred by the massive spike in video and data traffic across wired, cable and mobile networks.

Cisco Systems warned that a sharp drop in sales could push quarterly revenue down by as much as 10 percent.

The computer networking giant, the first major technology company to report earnings that include October, when the credit crisis spread beyond financial companies, said Wednesday that its sales had fallen 9 percent from the same month a year earlier.

Cisco expects sales for its current quarter to drop 5 percent to 10 percent from the $9.8 billion reported in the same period a year ago.

Arista Networks on Thursday announced the startup has landed two big executive fish: Jayshree Ullal and Andreas Bechtolsheim. Arista, formerly known as Arastra, a vendor of high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet and cloud networking solutions, is looking to give Cisco Systems a run for its money.

As IBM sets out to launch its Bluehouse corporate social network to compete with Cisco and Google, word comes that Facebook and MySpace are the most popular social-networking sites for mobile-phone users.

According to ABI Research, nearly half (46 percent) of those who use social networks have also visited a social network through a mobile phone. Of these, nearly 70 percent have visited MySpace, and another 67 percent visited Facebook. No other social-networking site reached 15 percent mobile adoption.

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Employees could be to blame for one of the most prominent security concerns facing businesses today: Loss of corporate information.

So say findings from a new Cisco global security study. The report offers insight into the risks employees take that could cause data leakage. The reason is clear: With the move toward distributed business models and remote workforces, lines are blurring between work and home lives. That's leading to more collaborative devices and applications, including mobile phones, laptops, Web 2.0 applications, video and other social media.

Forget the switches and routers that built Cisco Systems into a giant, albeit somewhat boring, company at the core of the Internet.

These days, the company is peddling e-mail software, video conferencing systems, cable TV boxes -- even furniture -- as it tries to break out of the data center and get its products in front of ordinary office workers.

"Cisco is kind of like the Madonna of networking," said Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. "It is continuously trying to reinvent itself."

D-Link Systems Inc. wants to sell more to businesses that have tighter purse strings these days.

The Fountain Valley-based maker of networking gear, part of Taiwan's D-Link Corp., is pitching its routers and other products as a cheaper way for budget-conscious businesses to expand their networks.

The company's selling point: We're cheaper than Cisco.

D-Link's less expensive prices could appeal to small and midsize companies that have seen their businesses slow this year, crimping their ability to spend on technology.