SYDNEY -- 6 December 2000 -- Australian technology professionals are playing a significant role in boosting worldwide sales of premium brand networking products from Cisco Systems, the world's leading provider of Internet hardware and services.
Sales of Remote Access Servers (RAS) represent a significant portion of Cisco's worldwide revenue of $US19 billion ending in July of 2000. Cisco's Sydney Development Engineering Group was responsible for several major software projects that provided new features on the Cisco AS5800 Remote Access Server, a leading product in the RAS field.
Cisco's Sydney Development Engineering Group added new features to the AS5800 which allowed it to handle 50 per cent more modems, increasing throughput to 2,016 simultaneous analog modem call terminations, over the previous maximum of 1,344. The AS5800 is specifically designed to meet the demands of telecommunications carriers, telecommunications service providers and Internet service providers (ISPs).
In addition to the traditional software engineering tasks, Cisco's Sydney Development Engineering Group successfully managed all required development activities, from Cisco's Sydney Engineering facility including working closely with various Cisco teams like marketing, hardware design, mechanical engineering, manufacturing and test engineers at Cisco's headquarters in California.
Cisco's Sydney Development Engineering Group consists of approximately 60 software engineers and is expected to double within the next two years. The team is working on a wide range of different projects relating to voice, fax, data and Internet communications technologies and reports directly it Bruce Juhlin, Senior Director of Engineering for the Remote Access Business Unit in Cisco in the United States.
According to Bruce Juhlin, "Using Cisco's internetworking technology allows us to tap into the skills of our development team in Australia. This is a high performance engineering team whose skills are truly world-class. We are committed to growing this team in order to take advantage of the solid pool of engineering talent in Australia."
Brendan Walker an engineering manger in Cisco's Sydney Development Engineering Group adds, "As a part of its strategy for continued market leadership, Cisco endeavours to build up and utilise off-shore R&D groups, like the one in Sydney, to avoid the constraints imposed by the current shortage of high technology professionals in the Silicon Valley area.
"In terms of the work we do in Sydney, its potential impact on the global economy and on our own careers, it's just like working in Silicon Valley - except we have all the life-style benefits of living in a great city like Sydney."
The enhancements to the AS5800 are now available to customers worldwide.
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