Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) polices are increasingly popular as a way for companies to let workers use the hardware they like best and are most productive with. But according to a new study from Cisco, that not be the best way to think about BYOD.

Implement a strong BYOD policy, Cisco says, and your organization could save $1,300 per year per mobile user. Users meanwhile, report that they are happier and more productive - even though they may end up paying more out of their own pockets!

(See also Worried Workers: BYOD Or You're SOL [Infographic])

Happier, More Productive, But Poorer?

The survey, released Wednesday by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) consulting unit, polled 2,415 users in six countries to determine the effects of letting employees bring their own devices into the office. The results indicate that employees around the world were very interested in BYOD, and they were even willing to pay for it: On average, workers said they would spend $965 out of pocket for their own devices and another $734 annually for the data plans to go with them.

Here's why: Workers with their own devices said they were happier and (more objectively) reported significant productivity gains. In the U.S., BYOD participants saved 81 minutes of time per week - just over 70 hours a year.

Not every country noted such productivity increases, and use of employee devices also had negative effects, such as increased administration, downtime and distractions that dragged the overall efficiency down, explained Jeff Loucks, senior manager at IBSG. 

Most of the devices in question were phones: 81% of device bringers reported they uses smartphones, 56% brought tablets and 37% brought their own laptops. On average, each of the estimated 198 million BYOD users around the world had 1.7 devices, said Loucks.

BYOD Keeps Growing

The number of BYOD users is expected to swell to 406 million by 2016. Even though the U.S. leads in BYOD use right now, by 2016, China alone is expected to have 166 million alone, compared to the 106 million in the U.S. and 76 million in India.

Companies fared best, Cisco discovered, when they implemented a strategic BYOD plan, rather than stick than just trying to keep up with devices coming into the organization. Such reactive policies tend to make users figure everything out for themselves, often working with an IT department that only grudgingly allows such devices into the organization.

Want to realize those promised cost benefits? Get ahead of users with a proactive BYOD policy that enables employees to quickly access corporate tools and data, perhaps featuring a self-service help system. Such policies also help organizations keep better security on corporate data.

(See also ReadWrite Survey Results: What A Typical BYOD Program Really Looks Like.)

Be Careful What You Wish For - BYOD Edition

As much as workers seem willing to pay their own way to get the devices they want without their employers' interference (only 30% said they would be willing to work with corporate-provisioned devices - often called Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled, or COPE), it's hard to shake the feeling that even though employees are more satisfied and productive, there's something unsettling if they end up footing the bill for this innovation. 

(See also Forget Bring Your Own Device - Try Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled.)

It's not an idle question: A recent Gartner survey of CIOs found that 38% said their companies planned stop providing employees with devices by 2016. Gartner also expects that nearly 50% of employers will demand employees provide their own devices for work purposes - out of pocket - by 2017.

Companies are increasingly willing to explore BYOD policies - but it seems that the reasons may not be entirely altruistic. Letting employees use the tools they prefer is clearly a good idea, but making them pay for the privilege doesn't seem right. 

You've installed antivirus software on your computers, configured your operating system to update its security automatically and password-protected your Wi-Fi. So your home network is safe against hackers, right?

Guess again. And then take a long look at your wireless router.

What Can Happen (Hint: It's Bad)

For years, manufacturers of home routers have all but ignored security issues, at least when it comes to making sure that consumers update their firmware to close exploitable vulnerabilities. Let's put it this way: Have you ever updated the firmware on your router? If not, odds are good that it's got one or more security holes through which a properly motivated hacker could slip.

Attacks on routers aren't common, partly for logistical reasons that make them uneconomical for hackers. But that could change as technology evolves, criminal incentives shift and security tightens up in other areas. One big potential trouble spot: the embedded Web servers that many routers use for managing their settings — including, of course, security.

Router manufacturers have done a lousy job informing users about firmware updates that would patch security flaws, and are even worse making it easy for users to obtain and install those updates. Such patches are seldom available through automatic services, forcing users to look up the fixes on manufacturer websites.

"These are low-priced, low-power devices," Tod Beardsley, a researcher with application security vendor Rapid7, said. Manufacturers "may not have the margins on these devices to provide ongoing software support."

To see what can happen when a flaw remains unpatched, look no further than a major intrusion in Brazil in 2011, when hackers broke into 4.5 million home DSL modems over the Internet. The modems were reconfigured to send users to malware-carrying imposter websites, primarily so thieves could steal their online banking credentials.

From Brazil With Love

That exploit in Brazil was similar to one that application security tester Phil Purviance recently employed against a wireless Linksys EA2700, which was released about a year ago. Called a cross-site request forgery, the technique allowed Purviance to break into the router's embedded management Web site. Once in, Purviance found he could change the login information and remotely manage the hardware.

"What I found was so terrible, awful, and completely inexcusable!" Purviance wrote in his blog. "It only took 30 minutes to come to the conclusion that any network with an EA2700 router on it is an insecure network!"

Purviance found a total of five vulnerabilities in two Linksys routers, the EA2700 and WRT54GL. Separately, flaws recently found in Linux-based routers from D-Link and Netgear could enable a hacker on the network to gain access to the command prompt on the operating system, Rapid7 reported.

D-Link and Netgear didn't respond to requests for comment. Belkin, which bought Linksys from Cisco last month, said in an email sent to ReadWrite that the EA2700 was fixed in a firmware update released last June. Called Smart Wi-Fi, the firmware is available through an opt-in update service. 

What Hackers Want

Manufacturers have gotten away with sloppy security practices because breaking into wireless routers usually requires physical proximity. That made it far harder for hackers to bust into multiple computers, because they'd have to move from network to network in order to target them. Thus hackers have tended to favor blasting out malware-carrying spam from a single location over attacking individual wireless routers.

But that could change. Industrial control systems that run manufacturing operations, power grids and other critical infrastructure are increasingly under pressure from cyberespionage campaigns. Vulnerabilities in these systems are as bad as in home routers. You can see just how bad is is via the search engine Shodan,  which collects information on 500 million connected devices, such as routers, printers, webcams and servers, each month.

In time, hackers will develop better tools and malware for breaking into hardware, and this technology will eventually find its way into the criminal underground.

How To Safeguard Your Router

In other words, it makes sense to safeguard your router now. Here are a few steps you can take to make your home network a less inviting target:

• In your router security settings, make sure you've changed any default usernames and passwords. These will be the first things any hacker tries, much the way a burglar jiggles a doorknob to see if it's unlocked.
• Disable wireless access to your router's management console, which allows you to manage its settings by pointing a Web browser to an address such as 192.168.1.1. Disabling wireless access means you'll have to be physically plugged into the router in order to manage it, making it far more difficult to hack.
• If you're sufficiently technically minded, consider replacing your router's doubtless buggy internal software with an open-source alternative such as DD-WRT, Tomato or OpenWRT. While these options aren't particularly consumer friendly, their firmware is less likely to contain obvious vulnerabilities — and will probably offer you some cool new features, too.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Updated at 12:35pm PT to make clear that embedded Web servers, not embedded browsers, pose a security threat in many routers.

Connected cars are hotter than turbo-charged V6 running at 8,000 RPM. The hype about how they're going to change the driving and passenger experience is accelerating faster than Danica Patrick coming out of a turn at a NASCAR race.

But most of the promises I've heard so far center around relatively prosaic things like better entertainment systems and integrated navigation. I like a great car stereo as much as anyone, but that just doesn't seem particularly revolutionary to me.

(See also Cars & The Internet Get Together At SXSW)

So I was looking forward to the connected car presentation at the Cisco Editors Conference in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. Much of it turned out to be pretty technical, all about how Cisco plans to support the back end of the process. That's important, but I was more interested in the some of the passing comments on the actual benefits connected cars are likely to deliver.

Why Driving Stinks

Maciej Kranz, VP and GM of Cisco's Connected Industries Group, laid out some of the grim statistics plaguing the world yet-to-be-connected cars:

Between 11% and 13% of commuting time is wasted in urban traffic congestion, for a total of 90 billion hours. (It just seems like of half of that is on the 101 Freeway between San Francisco and San Jose.) Some 7% to 12% of urban congestion is caused by people looking for parking. (It just seems like all of that comes in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.) Between 10% and 17% of of urban fuel is wasted at stoplights when there is no crosstraffic. Eighty percent of accidents (6.3 million) are caused by driver distraction.

"The good news," Kranz said, "is that we can actually lower all of these numbers quite dramatically."

How Connected Cars Make Driving Better

For congestion, that means traffic management and optimization of road networks. For parking issues, connected cars can link apps identifying the closest, most affordable available parking spaces to the vehicle's navigation. And the vehicles can intelligently adjust driving speeds to boost fuel efficiency.

Intelligent stoplights, for example, would know if there were 10 cars waiting in one direction but only 1 in the other, and adjust light timing to keep traffic moving. Along straight routes, Kranz said, they can build "green waves" of traffic signals to keep lanes flowing efficiently.

There's also the idea that if one car knows what other vehicles. traffic lights and other road infrastructure are doing, they can all adjust more efficiently. For examply, if your car knows that the car in front is about to make a turn or start braking, it can begin reacting even before it actually senses the action.

Cisco estimates this could lead to 7.5% less time wasted in traffic congestion and 4% lower costs for vehicle fuel, repairs and insurance. The benefits are particularly obvious in fleet settings, Kranz said. For example, a company with 10,000 delivery trucks would find it very valuable to be able to use connected technology to schedule preventive maintenance.

As for preventing accidents, vehicle-to-vehicle communications could enable a connected car to alert you if you get too close to the vehicle in front of you. If you don't respond, Kranz said, "at some point the car will make a decision to hit the brakes and avoid the accident."

Cisco estimatd 8% fewer accidents, 10% lower road costs and a 3% drop in carbon dioxide emissions.

Not Just Connecting The Car, But Also All Its Parts

The key to making all this happen, Kranz said, is not just connecting the car to the Internet, but also connecting together all of the various siloed subsystems in the car. When you connect a car to the Net, he said, "good things happen. More good things happen when you connect all of the systems," including telematics, diagnostics and driver assistance systems. Looked at this way, a self-driving car is just an advanced application of a connected car, taking over a higher-than usual proportion of the required tasks.

Cisco is pushing DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communications) technology to tie together the vehicle's various systems with the wider Internet.

Heck, if you ask me, though, even if connected cars just help me find a parking space on a Saturday night, all the development effort is totally worth it.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Networking giant Cisco predicted Wednesday that as we move into a "fundamentally mobile and video" world, the "Internet of Everything" — which combines the so-called Internet of Things with the Internet used by people and their mobile devices — will create $14.4 trillion in value and boost overall corporate profits by 21%. All by 2022.

Those are some pretty big numbers, shared by Cisco executives at a press event in San Jose on Wednesday. But while the vision makes sense, quantifying the changes to be wrought by growth of the Internet of Everything seems, well, fairly abitrary. To say the least.

What Goes Into $14.4 Trillion?

Rob Lloyd, Cisco President, Sales and Development, broke down the $14.4 trillion figure this way:

• $2.5 trillion in better asset utilization
• $2.5 trillion in employee productivity
• $2.7 in supply chain logistics
• $3.7 trillion in better customer experience.
• $3 trillion in enabling new innovations.

Perhaps we can start by seeing which industries benefit first and most dramatically. According to Lloyd, the top candidates include manufacturing, the public sector, energy and utlities, healthcare, finance/insurance, transportation and wholesale/distribution.

The Internet of Everything combines several trends, including the growth of connected devices, the increasing use of video, cloud computing, Big Data and the increasing importance of mobile apps compared to traditional computing applications.

Lloyd did lay out numbers to support the importance of the trends. But though these are also all giant numbers, connecting them to the $14.4 trillion figure still requires a leap of faith.

In terms of connected devices, he said, we've gone from 200 million in 2000 to 10 billion devices today, to a predicted 50 billion by 2020. On the mobile side, Lloyd said, 20 billion mobile apps were downloaded last year alone. By 2017, he added, two-thirds of mobile traffic will be video.

New Levels Of Complexity To Support New Uses

That complexity will make today's issues "look very, very minor," and pose historic challenges to manage, Lloyd said. That statement, at least, is easy to grasp. "We've been warming up for this for the last five years." The company already has a number of projects in the works demonstrating key elements of the trend, including installing smart meters and pole-top routers for BC Hydro in Canada, and a single auto plant with 50,000 IP devices.

Cisco's Sean Curtis demo'd live data from San Carlos, Calif., showing a heat map for mobile connections using "dwell time" metrics to track how efficiently pedestrian traffic was moving through the suburb's commuter train station. Curtis said similar information mashups have been applied to San Carlos' farmers market, offering insights into how many shoppers showed up, how long they stayed and which stalls they visited — information that would be of great use to both retailers and city planners.

The next step, Curtis said, is to link that kind of data with store data as well as parking and traffic information to help shoppers optimize their experience. The idea is that eventually shoppers could see the best route to the least crowded store with the best prices on the items they were looking for.

As apps like that come online, the Internet of Everything should indeed spur growth. Maybe even trillions of dollars worth of growth. Exactly how much and when, though, seems a Big Data question of the highest order. 

Rising Expectations, Bigger Security Issues

The rise of the Internet of Everything is already changing corporate expectations, Lloyd said, not to mention who pays for technology advances. "The Internet of Everything will be driven by business funding, not just IT funding," Lloyd said.

What about security for all this connected information? Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology and strategy officer, said "the data will be collected whether we want it to be or not. How will it be used? That is the security question."

Photos by Fredric Paul

No One Stays On Top Forever

Room For Growth?

Even as it lost the lead in market cap, Apple may also have lost its primacy in generating buzz. No product this year - shipping or not - has generated the buzz of Google Glass. Even the launch of a new smartphone is no longer all about Apple, as Samsung ratchets up the hype leading up to next week's launch of its flagship Galaxy S4. 

Getting Harder To Move The Needle

I simply don’t believe Apple will make, or even wants to make, a TV set. To realize the dream, as discussed previously, you need to put a computer - something like an Apple TV module - inside the set. Eighteen months later, as Moore’s Law dictates, the computer is obsolete but the screen is just fine. No problem, you’ll say, just make the computer module removable, easily replaced by a new one; more revenue for Apple… and you’re right back to today’s separate box arrangement. 

With IBM tossing its might behind OpenStack, the open source software used to run cloud-computing installations is in a strong position to become the dominant platform in the industry.

OpenStack Rising

IBM announced Monday that it will make OpenStack the foundation of its cloud services and software. In backing the open source project, Big Blue joined other tech heavyweights behind the technology, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace.

"IBM is the big fish in the sea and for them to make the level of commitment that they did today is a big deal," said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research. "That's the kind of heft OpenStack needs."

The announcement is likely to send OpenStack's two main competitors VMware and CloudStack, another open source cloud computing platform, into a battle for second place.

“OpenStack has won the race to become the standard, and it has done it rapidly,” Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist and a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, told AllThingsD.

IBM And Open Source

IBM has conducted a long love affair with open source software. In 2000, it backed Linux and a year later committed $1 billion to the development of the operating system. IBM's support helped drive Linux into large organizations and made it a viable competitor against Microsoft as a server platform.

"IBM could have the same impact on OpenStack as it did on the Linux world," Staten said.

IBM recognized years ago that open source code fit its business strategy a lot better than proprietary technology. The company draws most of its $100 billion in annual revenue from providing IT services. By basing a lot of its own technology on the code from various open source projects, as well as industry standards, IBM is able to work its hardware and software into what enterprise types call "heterogeneous computing environments" — the combinations of patched-together technology from a variety of vendors typically found in large companies, the segment of the tech market IBM is strongest.

"IBM has really great credibility in the open source community," Gary Chen, analyst for International Data Corp., said. "They really do understand open source."

IBM's First OpenStack Product

IBM followed its announcement with the introduction of its first OpenStack-based product, SmartCloud Orchestrator. SmartCloud is the brand name for IBM's platform for running cloud installations in customers' or IBM's data centers or in a combination of both. Orchestrator is a service customers use to configure the computing, storage and networking resources for cloud applications.

One unanswered question is how IBM will integrate its current SmartCloud code base with OpenStack. In an interview with NetworkWorld, Robert LeBlanc, a senior vice president of software for IBM, waxed mystical in describing how Big Blue will handle the transition.

"We're on a continual journey," LeBlanc said. "But we think this is a major step in that journey."

Cloud Standards

IBM clearly wants to influence OpenStack's technological direction and efforts to develop industry standards for cloud computing, which is still a relatively immature architecture. IBM has formed a 400-member Cloud Standards Customer Council to help push other tech vendors in a direction favorable to IBM. The company says it has more than 5,000 customers running private clouds on its platform.

IBM is also a major player in standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

While standards are key to making different technologies work together, they won't help companies make the cultural changes necessary to adopt cloud computing and make it work. Delivering applications as a Web service dramatically changes the role of IT departments and affects how employees interact with software, too.

Because of its success in professional services, IBM is in a strong position to help companies make those cultural changes, but it won't be easy. "A lot of enterprises are not ready to hear it," Staten said.

Nevertheless, the momentum in the tech industry is behind cloud computing. The public cloud service market alone is expected to grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion worldwide.

With that much money on the table, IBM plans to become a major player in the market and is betting that OpenStack can help it achieve that goal.

Image courtesy of ShutterStock

Cisco has installed more than 1,900 telepresence systems around the world, offering business-oriented, multi-camera video-conferencing technology designed to gives the impression that all the participants are sitting in the same room.

With a new partnership with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Cisco will be putting this tech in business-school classrooms, offering what's being called a fully immersive, coast-to-coast educational experience - starting with San Francisco- and Philadelphia-connected classes.

In a press conference and demonstration Monday at Wharton's San Francisco MBA campus, Cisco executives and Wharton alums introduced "The Connected Classroom." Using Cisco's telepresence technology, Wharton Dean Tom Robertson and others were projected onto a floor-to-ceiling screen in 1080p HD, while rear screens projected the Philadelphia classroom onto the back wall and 80-inch monitors mounted on the side displayed PowerPoint slides and guest speakers from Oklahoma and London.

One look at the kind of tech Cisco has supplied Wharton with is enough to put the business school substantially ahead in the virtual classroom race. Not only was every monitor in the room broadcasting hi-def streams across the country with a bandwidth rate of 1.5Mbps, but the audio was seamless, with no microphones required, nor any needed volume adjustment from the various speakers spread out across three states and two different continents. 

Wharton is taking two approaches to telepresence - one will let remote lecturers teach a class from thousands of miles away, the other will let lecturers speak in person to one classroom while another classroom participates using telepresence. Wharton hopes to begin this teaching model next quarter with a handful classes and varying room sizes.

Leveraging Resources And Reputation

The goal of the partnership - beyond Wharton's talking points revolving around improving the student experience and being to teach from anywhere with anyone - is to leverage Wharton's resources and reputation for a future in which virtual education is more and more common. Beyond that, Wharton hopes to position itself as a technologically advanced and reputable option compared to the ever-increasing numbers of non-traditional approaches to online education - many of which are vastly less expensive than an Ivy League MBA program.

The telepresence model seems to have particular advantages for business schools. Wharton's sprawling alumni base offers a large industry-specific list of guest lecturers - and telepresence could help bring these experts into the classroom - opening real-time debates from contrasting viewpoints. Wharton also plans to use the system to greatly expand the reach of its lucrative executive education programs for working professionals.

As to how effective this model will be depends on how immersive the experience is, and how much value can be added by bringing in more screens. As Wharton demonstrated the technology, only one speed bump hindered an otherwise impressive display of high-speed, high-definition communication: the inability to project two seperate live feeds of remote speakers simultaneously. The presentation seamlessly looped in a Cisco member from Oklahoma on one of the giant LEDs, but wasn't able to project the second speaker from London onto the adjoining screen (they simply switched off one feed and brought in the other). 

But that hiccup aside, this virtual classroom experience pretty much lived up to the goal of replicating the experience of actually being in the same room as a remote teacher. During the presentation's Q&A, for example, randomly selected members from the room in San Francisco and the linked room in Philadelphia asked the same person questions, with unhindered audio transmission and in completely lag-free real-time interaction. Cost aside, there is no doubt that the telepresence experience easily eclipses other virtual classroom technologies. 

One-Touch Record

Through integration of Cisco Jabber, the company's unified communications application, the video lectures will also be accessible through mobile devices, tablets and laptops.

And using Cisco's Capture, Transform, and Share video platform, the system gives Wharton professors the ability to easily record their lectures. But that's only the beginning. The next step is to combine the videos with Cisco's speech recognition software. More advanced YouTube indexing, Cisco's system transcribes and indexes the entire audio stream, allowing students to jump in at the exact moment an important term or topic is uttered by the professor.

Cost And Expansion

Wharton and Cisco representatives were vague about how much all this will cost, saying, "Wharton already had existing technologies in place that are being utilized for this solution, which... makes quoting a figure challenging." Examples of components from other third parties include projectors, LCD monitors and projection screens, they said.

Will this approach be marketed to other B-schools? It's too soon to tell. "Cisco may opt to market the technology to other academic institutions, but there is no formal announcement of these plans today," they said. "As per future collaborations, Cisco and Wharton have a close partnership and will indeed explore additional opportunities if and when they present themselves." 

Top image courtesy of Cisco. Second image by Nick Statt.

In 2010, Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers told reporters at the company's reseller conference in San Francisco, "We don't focus on other companies. We focus on market transitions."

The statement was a half-truth. Chambers should have said companies other than Microsoft.

On Monday, the eve of Microsoft's first Lync User Conference, Rowan Trollope, general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, posted a blog that that explained why Lync was inferior to Cisco's platform for unified communications and collaboration.

"I'm quite sure some of it will generate controversy but that's OK - it's a conversation worth having in our opinion," Trollope writes.

But as sometimes happens when brands or political campaigns "go negative," the whole thing is blowing up in Cisco's face, as analysts point out the weaknesses in Cisco's arguments.

The real takeaway, in fact, is that Cisco seems to be scared of what Microsoft is selling.

Cisco's Claims

Trollope's post isn't super nasty, at least not by Apple-v-Android standards. But he takes some shots at Microsoft Lync, calling it "a solution that's primarily been developed for a desktop PC user experience" and thus "less able to meet these wider post-PC requirements than one that has been designed and optimized for them from the outset."

An example of the latter, Trollope says, would be Cisco's UC&C, which is a set of integrated products, such as messaging, Internet telephony, video conferencing and data sharing. All the products are accessed through a single user interface.

Another of Trollope's criticism is that with Microsoft, customers need to go out and buy all sorts of different devices instead of getting everything from a single vendor. "And, in our opinion, that could lead to increased complexity, cost and risk, not to mention the hours spent trying to figure out `who's on first' when troubleshooting an issue."

And finally this:

"There are other important topics that we think should also be discussed. Does your collaboration vendor have any conflict of interest with other BYOD device vendors? Can you move from an in-house deployment to a cloud-based service and get the same functionality? We would encourage you to explore these points with us and any other vendors you are considering."

This is all pretty garden-variety competitive marketing, and certainly far less aggressive than what Microsoft does with its anti-Google "Scroogled" campaigns.

Nevertheless, analysts were quick to cry foul and to point out flaws in Cisco's arguments.

Cisco's Hypocrisy

A large part of what Trollope called a "frank and direct conversation" was a "little far fetched and hypocritical," Gartner analyst Steve Blood says.

Cisco claims Microsoft's Surface tablet represented a conflict of interest, since Lync would also support competing tablets from Apple and Google. Cisco seems to have forgotten its own entry into the tablet market with Cius, which failed miserably and was pulled last year. "It wasn't worried about a conflict of interest then," Blood says.

Cisco also has other conflicts when it comes to hardware. While its UC&C products work on other vendor's systems, they run best on Cisco's Unified Computing System. And when it comes to partners offering Cisco UC&C in the cloud, its UCS server is the only hardware option, Blood says.

Trollope claims Lync is more complex and expensive because customers need to get phones, video equipment, voice and video gateways and networking gear through hardware partners since Microsoft doesn't make those products, while Cisco sells its own integrated hardware and software.

Art Schoeller, analyst for Forrester Research, isn't buying Trollope's argument. "Each account is different in what they have, what they want, and what capabilities are important to them and what model appeals to them more," he says.

While Cisco arguably has a stronger hosted platform than Microsoft, Cisco's biggest resellers are also selling hosted Lync and Office 365, which is "a recognition by Cisco's partners that in some instances, the Microsoft solution is something they would want to propose in place of Cisco," Blood says.

The biggest problem Microsoft has in offering Lync in the cloud is with voice communications. In many countries, as soon as voice hits the cloud, it becomes a regulated service, much like that of a carrier. Microsoft and Cisco are solving the problem by partnering with carriers. "Currently, Microsoft promotes Lync on premise, if a customer wants deeper voice capabilities like conferencing," Schoeller says.

Cisco Feels The Competition

Cisco is going on the offensive because Microsoft is becoming a serious competitor, which is good for companies in the market for unified communications products. However, Cisco would do better to focus on customers, rather than spend time attacking the competition with "ill-prepared, and weak arguments such as this," Blood says.

In a recent interview with AllThingsD, Chambers said, "We love to compete, and we try to always compete with class."

If Chambers believes Trollope's blog is class, then he needs to look up the definition.

Cisco is one of those companies people have a hard time figuring out. Despite the confusion, though,he company has posted a 44% increase in income from last year in its fiscal second quarter earnings released on Wednesday. And its long-term future looks even better.

Clearly, some people have gotten Cisco figured out, because they're doing business with the networking giant. The question is, what kind of business?

Retreat Or Strategic Withdrawl?

Look at the history of Cisco, and you see a company very much in retreat from the consumer market it had briefly coveted. Instead of routers for consumers and Flip video cameras, now its business is done back in the server rooms and network cabinets, as it once again targets the IT infrastructure of enterprises and governments around the world.

The drive to be the big-kid networking company on the proverbial block is more than just about selling equipment by the ton. It's also about developing a platform on these devices upon which applications can be run. Along with apps on the clients and the servers, Cisco is envisioning applications that will also run on the routers and switches. The end result, Cisco believes, will be a network that instantly responds to the needs of the data flowing within it, without the need to consume resources at either end of the data transmission.

Software-defined networks are but one outcome of this type of network-app paradigm. All-in-one networking appliances built to handle very specific tasks are another.

This is not, by any means, a sudden pivot by Cisco. As far back as 2009, the company was holding developer contests and hackfests to kickstart this type of app development (Disclosure: in 2009, I was an honorary judge for one such contest, while working with the Linux Foundation.) This is a vision that it has seen for a long time.

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

Ironically, even as Cisco seems to retreat into the server rooms and network centers, the impact of the company may be felt by more consumers than ever were touched by its actual consumer product lines.

Cisco execs have made no secret that the future of their business lies in the Internet of Things, the hardware-oriented network of communication that will let your car tell your mechanic a fan belt is 1,000 miles away from epic fail even as the car is toodling down the Interstate. Or the micro-sensors in your heart that will tell your doctor basically the same thing, if the futurists' visions are on the ball.

As cool as that kind of information transfer will be, somebody's got to build the network to handle all that data - and all the other big data that will be generated through the "regular" Internet of ecommerce and entertainment systems.

(See also Peta, Exa, Yotta And Beyond: Big Data Reaches Cosmic Proportions [Infographic])

This is the job Cisco envisions for itself, and even though this current repositioning may be painful, the end result may put the company in the best place to take on this massive undertaking.

Which would be a bright future, indeed.

Image courtesy of Adriano Castelli/Shutterstock.

Cisco grabbed some of the limelight at the Consumer Electronics Show by unveiling a cloud-based video platform for service providers like cable TV companies. A lot of hubbub was made over technology, which would deliver movies and TV shows on any device at any time. But in all the oohing and aahing over the new product, Cisco and partners left out one important detail: TV lovers will be paying a lot more for these services.

Videoscape Unity

Cisco's Videoscape Unity is a content-delivery platform for the living room. Software embedded in a set-top box would enable subscribers to watch content from a TV, tablet and smartphone. Cable operators would be able to deliver, for example, a Major League Baseball game on the TV and provide simultaneously stats on the players on an iPad.

In addition, the technology would be able to recommend movies and programming based on a person's TV habits, and a cloud-based digital video recorder (DVR) would let subscribers record content for viewing later from any device. The platform would also have a social media element. Viewers will be able to chat with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

For the pay TV industry, Cisco's platform provides a much better business model for squeezing more money from subscribers. In general, cable operators today charge more by adding channels to packages. However, the cost of content is high and good programming is scarce. Just think of how many times you've searched dozens of channels and found nothing you really want to watch.

Changing Business Models

With technology like Cisco's, cable operators will have to worry less about the number of channels they offer and focus instead on charging more for the services they provide. For example, European cable operator Liberty Global rolled out last year its Horizon platform that provides similar services to Cisco's product. Horizon represents a "whole brand new revenue stream," Balan Nair, chief technology officer for Liberty, says.

"With our Horizon product when we launched it, we didn't have anymore-new channels, but we charged quite a bit more for that product," Nair said during a panel discussion following Cisco's announcement. "And it was just based on the fact that you got a whole bunch of new features and some ancillary services."

Using technology to sell more products to subscribers is behind much of the excitement over products like Videoscape Unity. But whatever money comes in won't go only to the cable operators. Deals will have to be made with movie studios and TV networks, and possibly Apple, which currently dominates the tablet market.

With Apple, Nair made it clear that Liberty Global prefers not to offer its service through an app sold in Apple's App Store. "There's a whole bunch of other ramifications associated with that, especially in the economics of delivering that content," he said. Liberty would rather use a browser plug-in to deliver programming via the web.

New Content Deals

Content providers have already put cable operators on notice that they will need to sign licensing deals to let people watch on multiple devices. New contracts will also be needed, if cable operators plan to let people view programming on a tablet outside of the home.

Another issue is whose customer is the viewer? Is it the cable company, the content provider or the TV network? Also, who gets access to valuable information, such as TV habits, and how is revenue from services and advertising shared?

"Part of the challenge is how does this stuff get glued together so that it's intuitive and seamless to the user, understanding the fact that there are business models that are very important that need to exist or change or evolve," panelist Joe Inzerillo, senior vice president for multimedia and distribution for MLB.com, said. "This content, this professional content, is not created for free and that's sort of the elephant in the room. How do you get there?"

Until new revenue sharing and licensing agreements are made, it's unlikely cable operators and content providers will sign up for Cisco's or any other new platform for TV. For example, Cox is committed to Videoscape Unity, but it hasn't said whether it would include a cloud-based DVR, according to CNET.

Indeed, the use of such a service has been challenged before. In 2007, the TV and movie industry sued Cablevision for launching what it called a "networked DVR." Instead of having the video recorder functionality within the set-top box, the cable operator stored recorded programming on a remote server, reducing Cablevision's hardware cost by taking the DVR out of the box.

Cablevision won the suit on appeal in 2008, but that has made movie studios and TV networks even more cautious in letting cable operators use the cloud to provide content to subscribers.

In time, deals will get made as the home entertainment center evolves from static viewing to a more interactive experience. But as business models are built around services, as well as programming, consumers will have to look at their current cable TV bill and decide how much more they are willing to pay.

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