Cisco - TABPI

NEWS&ANALYSIS
Cisco switching gears
UPGRADES, COST CUTS
KEY TO ITS STRATEGY
By Paula Musich IN SAN JOSE, CALIF.
Cisco systems inc.’s strategy
for switching—which
makes up 41 percent of
the company’s revenues—
includes a number of planned
upgrades as well as efforts to
streamline product development
and reduce costs, according
to company officials here.
Most new developments
focus on the high-end Catalyst
6500 chassis switch,
although many innovations
trickle down to other switching
platforms from there,
according to Charlie Giancarlo,
senior vice president
and general manager of product
development at Cisco.
Cisco is focusing its innovation
efforts on continued
manageability improvements
for this year and beyond—
especially on centralized management
functions that can be
“pushed out” to remote sites,
according to Andy Bechtolsheim,
vice president and general
manager of Cisco’s Gigabit
switching business unit.
Most often with security
functions, “there is a shortage
of experts,” Bechtolsheim
said. But Cisco, through its
experience running a large
global network, can “advise
customers on how best to
organize the security functions,”
he said.
Bechtolsheim acknowledged
that Cisco is working
on more global authentication
systems that can better safeguard
company secrets from
internal threats. For such protection,
a multilayer system is
required to ensure the right
people get access to appropriate
information.
In tackling configuration
42 eWEEK n MAY 26, 2003
management, which will
become more complex as
Cisco adds more switch functions,
Bechtolsheim said
Cisco’s goal is to automate
setup, configuration and maintenance
“as much as we can.
We want to give a single person
a view of the whole thing.”
In switch architecture, Luca
Cafiero, senior vice president
and general manager
of switching, voice and storage,
outlined Cisco investments
in high performance.
Cafiero said that a new chip,
code-named Sacramento, will
contain 180 million transistors
on a single chip—four
times as many as that of the
On tap at Cisco
Pentium 4 chip at the same
size. That is among 29 other
application-specific integrated
circuits in development at
Cisco today, Cafiero said.
Cisco’s new Catalyst 720
Supervisor module delivers
for the Catalyst 6500 chassis
the ability to support 40G-bps
throughput per slot today.
Cafiero said he expects to be
able to double that to 80G bps.
The time frame for release
of such capability is dependent
on customer demand,
he added.
Cafiero, as an aside, said
he does not expect to see
Ethernet data rates increase
by another factor of 10—
breaking into 100G bps, but
he does expect to see 40G bps
in the next two years. ´
SPSS, SAS take predictive paths
By Dennis Callaghan
Data mining stalwarts spss inc. and sas
Institute Inc. are each planning to add
more predictive capabilities to their
respective Web analytics software offerings.
SPSS announced last week a product called
Predictive Web Analytics, which will combine
the Chicago-based company’s NetGenesis Web
analysis software with its flagship Clementine
data mining software.
SAS, of Cary, N.C., is developing a bundled
offering of its own, to be known as SAS Web
Analytics. It is expected to be generally available
by the second quarter of next year, after a
limited test rollout in the first quarter. The application
is expected to combine elements of
five existing SAS products to enable predictive
analysis of Web site visits, officials said.
Most Web site analysis tools have usually
focused on historical analysis of visitors’ activities
at the site, such as page views, clickthroughs,
and the sites users came from or went
to. But predictive capabilities could take that
analysis and build customer segmentation models
that could build better sites and marketing
campaigns, as well as e-mail marketing
campaigns, to generate maximum response.
SPSS’ Predictive Web Analytics will add
Clementine’s data mining engine to
NetGenesis Web analytics so that users will
be able to detect patterns in large volumes
� Manageability enhancements
for the Catalyst 6500
chassis
� Sacramento chip to contain
180 million transistors
� Catalyst 720 Supervisor
module for the Catalyst
6500 to support 40G-bps
throughput
of Web data and predict the best way to
serve customers via the Web, officials said.
Clementine performs advanced predictive
analysis on customer behavior data in the Net-
Genesis eDataMart and reports the results of
that analysis to the NetGenesis reporting environment.
Users of Predictive Web Analytics will be
able to segment site visitors based on their
behavior; detect content and product affinities;
identify the most significant paths taken
through a Web site; and predict visitors’
propensity to purchase, view particular content
or to churn, officials said.
Predictive Web Analytics is available now,
with pricing starting at $135,000 plus services.
SAS, meanwhile, is developing a bundled
solution for predictive Web analysis that will
offer similar capabilities. While the company
already delivers predictive Web analysis
through its IntelliVisor hosted services for specific
vertical industries such as pharmaceuticals
and financial services, this bundled
solution will add predictive capabilities to SAS’
WebHound Web analysis tool, officials said.
Plans call for SAS Web Analytics to include
technology from WebHound as well as SAS’
Enterprise Miner, Web Report Studio, Portal
and Interaction Manager applications, although
the exact product bundling has yet to
be determined, officials said. ´