Network management Toolkit

Cisco's product strategy: A view from the top

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Cisco

Marguerite Reardon CNET News

Published: 09 Jun 2004 15:20 BST

Wondering what networking giant Cisco Systems has up its sleeve? Mario Mazzola is the man to ask.

Mazzola, the company's chief development officer, is one of the most influential executives in the company. Specifically, Mazzola heads Cisco's overall research and development strategy, and manages its entire engineering organisation, comprised of 11 technology groups. He is responsible for the development of the company's routing software, core Internet Protocol (IP) routers, Ethernet switches, network management services, optical networking equipment, storage switches, voice technologies and wireless gear.

Born and raised in Italy, Mazzola has been with the company since 1993, when Cisco acquired Crescendo Communications, the start-up he co-founded in 1990. It was Cisco's first acquisition. Today, Crescendo's technology forms the basis of one of Cisco's most successful product lines, the Catalyst, a local-area network (LAN) switch.

ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com caught up with Mazzola after Cisco unveiled its next-generation core Internet router in late May. After four years of development and a $500m investment, Cisco finally revealed the new IP core router, which it asserts can scale a capacity of up to 90 terabits per second. In an effort to satisfy carrier demands for better reliability, resiliency and scalability, the company developed a new operating system for the router, IOS XR.

Cisco just spent $500m over the past four years to develop its next-generation core IP router, the CRS-1. When do you expect to start making some of this money back?
This is a long-term type of investment. We don't expect a return in one year. But it's hard to be specific, especially when you consider that the technology will be leveraged in many other products.

In the past, we've always exceeded our expectations. When we first introduced the GSR 12000, we thought we'd only sell 1,000. To date, we've sold about 25,000. With high-end platforms like this, the penetration is not huge. It's hard to imagine when service providers will need to scale to 90 terabits per second. But I think that if you make the bandwidth available, carriers will find applications to use it. I am always amazed at how quickly technology changes.

Cisco just started shipping the latest version of its IP core router, the Gigabit Switch Router, or GSR 12800, last quarter. But doesn't the introduction of the CRS-1 make the GSR obsolete?
No, not really. There is still a need for different products in our portfolio. Somebody building a network completely from scratch may want the latest and greatest technology. But there are a lot of customers with $40m to $50m investment in GSR technology. The GSR 12800 offers them an opportunity to upgrade and quadruple performance.

What is the strategy for the new operating software Cisco has developed? Will it be extended to the rest of Cisco's routers?
Right now, we are announcing IOS XR just on the CRS-1. We are considering expanding the offering on other products. We aren't making any announcements right now, but we are expecting to leverage it on different product lines, such as the GSR.

Will it be used in any enterprise products?
We don't have plans to use the software on enterprise-specific products. There are different requirements for support in the enterprise, but some aspects of the IOS XR software could be used in the enterprise. So we will likely move some desirable characteristics of the software into some of these products. But these products don't necessarily need the fine-grain modularity of IOS XR.