Cisco Systems gives its clients a look ahead
George Mellor runs a Providence computer company that does a lot of business with the network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. He made the trip to Boston this week to learn what Cisco planned to do to help support companies like his in the coming year.
Among the Cisco representatives on hand was Andrew Sage, who flew in from the company's headquarters in California to talk up its new small-business initiatives, and Paul Bosco, who was on hand to promote software and hardware products developed at Cisco's New England Development Center in Boxborough.
All three joined the roughly 1,500 technology pros who descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center yesterday morning for the networking giant's annual Partner Summit. This year, the three-day event, the first held in Boston, is serving a dual purpose for the San Jose company: enhancing relationships with its "partners," the businesses from 93 countries that resell Cisco products and promoting the research at its Boxborough development center, which employs 1,700 workers on a campus off Interstate 495.
Cisco's presence in the Boston tech community has been overshadowed by high-profile local research outposts for Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., and International Business Machines Corp., but Bosco, the Development Center's general manager and site executive, is promising to "take the story up a notch. We want to engage more aggressively with New England entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and universities."
Over the past 15 years, Cisco, best known for its routers and switches - the "plumbing of the Internet," has acquired 15 New England companies for a total investment of $11 billion. And the Boxborough campus is the company's third largest in the United States, after the San Jose headquarters and a location in Raleigh, N.C. The company also has smaller facilities in Boston, Burlington, and Portsmouth, N.H.
Cisco products are primarily sold through a global network of companies, large and small, that resell and service its technology.
Fully 80 percent of Cisco's revenue comes from these partners (a much smaller percentage comes from direct sales of consumer products like Linksys home networking products and the trendy Flip video cameras).
Cisco partners include AT&T Inc., British Telecommunication PLC, and Verizon. On the other end of the scale are small technology companies like Providence-based CBE Technologies LLC, which installs communication networks for organizations such as the Boston Public Library.
"It's important for us to be here to find out what Cisco's latest thinking is in terms of direction, new technologies," said CBE chief executive George Mellor as he emerged from an address yesterday by Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior.
And the latest, at least at this year's conference? "We want to be leading the second wave of the Internet," said Sage, Cisco's vice president, worldwide channels. "Data centers, which are the beating heart of the Internet, are a big part of that. But so is video and collaboration," meaning products to allow employees in different locations to work together.
Prominently on display at this year's show: "TelePresence" technology that Cisco is hoping will make videoconferencing easier to use and more accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. Two demonstration areas in a "collaboration lounge" allowed partners to try Cisco TelePresence systems - one priced at $32,000, another at $85,000.
Roger L. Kay, a technology market analyst and the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., is not surprised that Cisco is promoting videoconferencing. "Visual and video communication is driving a lot of growth" on the Internet, he said. "Cisco can leverage itself into new markets by helping its partners get into new businesses like videoconferencing."
Another Cisco initiative promoted at the conference was a "unified computing" approach to data centers, which Cisco promises will combine networking, computing, and storage into one cohesive system of components controlled by the company's products.
Significantly, the initiative includes a technology from Cisco's New England Development Center that enables the linking of different computers and software platforms, and a strategic alliance with storage company EMC Corp. in Hopkinton.
Bosco likes the way this could play out for the region.
"It looks like New England is developing into a combination of where Cisco is strong, and where it wants to be," he said. "That's a good sign."
D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com. 