ITU Telecom 2003 Stand No. 6100 Hall 6, Geneva Palexpo
SAN JOSE, Calif., and Geneva, October 13, 2003 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), this week will announce, at ITU Telecom in Geneva, Switzerland, a series of new customer deployments and technology advancements. To further its commitment to the telecommunications service provider market, Cisco® is acting on elements of its strategy to work with service providers to build, deploy and generate demand for new and profitable services, while optimizing service providers' business.
The evolution of service providers' traditional, circuit-based network architectures to all-packet networks rapidly accelerated in 2003. To help service providers navigate this evolution, Cisco is focusing on three critical technology drivers for customer success: convergence, managed services and broadband services.
Convergence can provide operational savings. Service providers today are seeking a common packet-based infrastructure, or "converged" network that supports data, voice and video, to deliver and differentiate their service portfolios. This trend has influenced the adoption of Internet Protocol (IP) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). With its industry-leading portfolio of IP products and extensive expertise, Cisco is working with service providers to assist in their migration to a converged architecture, and now increases its market-leading position with more than 200 MPLS customers worldwide. These customers include Bell Canada, BellSouth, BT, T-Systems, Infonet, O2, and Telecom Italia.
Managed Services can provide revenue and margin growth. Cisco is helping service providers offer more value-added services that better address the challenges their end customers are facing, understanding that it is not what the technology can do, but what the customers can do with the technology that makes the network more relevant to the business process. For example, British Telecom (BT) is deploying the Cisco Managed Business Voice solution, providing the flexibility needed for its major customers, such as Abbey, to convert to Cisco IP phones at some sites, exploiting the cost savings and productivity gains of converged voice and data networking, and to retain traditional time-division multiplexing private branch exchanges at other sites. The Managed Business Voice solution preserves Abbey's existing private dialing plans and maintains feature transparency across these mixed deployments.
Broadband is a means for service delivery. Not only is broadband among the fastest-growing services, it also provides the greatest potential as the foundation for the deployment of other services and associated revenue for service providers. Broadband has strong potential to gain ubiquitous "utility" status within the next five years through the proliferation of both wired and wireless access. Because of this trend, Cisco is using its recent acquisition of Linksys® as a means of working with service providers to develop value-added consumer services for deployment over broadband connections. Just as voice mail and call waiting increased the service provider's revenue, newer IP-based services such as IP Video Camera and wireless networking for broadband will allow carriers to incrementally increase their revenue streams. Visit the Cisco stand for more details and to view Linksys equipment.
"Clearly the network is taking on new levels of relevancy for the end user," said Sameer Padhye, vice president of Service Provider Marketing at Cisco. "Cisco is partnering with service providers around the globe to deliver the power of convergence, and a host of broadband technologies and managed services that deepen the significance of the carrier network to the businesses and lives of the end customers. Cisco's extensive end-customer relationships and understanding of both enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses puts us in a unique position to assist service providers with developing services to better satisfy their business and consumer customer needs. This, combined with our technology expertise and ability to accelerate demand and optimize service provider businesses, is part of our drive to be the most complete partner for service provider success."
For more information about specific Cisco announcements at Telecom Geneva 2003, visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.
