7/20/2004 -- Cisco Systems has a justifiable reputation for playing it safe, but increasingly, the networking giant has been at the cutting edge of the technology curve, even helping – argues one analyst – to define the status quo.

In at least one respect, Cisco’s aggressiveness has paid off, says Steven Schuchart, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc. “That push has resulted [in] a competitive advantage in the form of high density, high performance line cards for its Catalyst 4500 and Catalyst 6500 switching platforms, including some unmatched features such as gigabit Ethernet with 802.3af PoE support and other cutting edge features,” he points out.

The upshot, Schuchart finds, is that Cisco is competitive in all of the markets -- at least ten -- in which it fields product entries or services. “Cisco remains unchallenged in the breadth of its product solutions for the enterprise, which include all the key components an enterprise requires,” he writes. “No other vendor can challenge Cisco in terms of product breadth and depth.”

Nevertheless, even the most dominant company has a weakness or two. In Cisco’s case, Schuchart identifies several potential issues, including what could be considered one of the most attractive features of Cisco’s Catalyst 6500 switching platform – its flexibility. “While Cisco can cater to the largest of enterprises with its Supervisor 720 architecture, achieving these levels of performance is simply cost prohibitive,” he writes. “Cisco has made some strides in simplifying the deployment of its high-end modules, but provisioning a full- performance system still requires the appropriate supervisor, modules, and daughtercards, all of which carry hefty price tags.”

Similarly, writes Schuchart, the demonstrated robustness, scalability, and configurability of Cisco’s IOS software are potentially unmatched. But the evolution of IOS may have been too much of a good thing, Schuchart suggests. “Cisco’s IOS software has become extremely complicated due the constant addition of new features. As a result, customers must spend additional time and resources training staff to leverage and configure the technologies that the company provides in IOS,” he comments. “The complexity of IOS is beginning to become a competitive disadvantage, as competitors such as Juniper begin to attack Cisco’s monolithic architecture on the basis of its reliability and flexibility.”

Finally, Cisco is vulnerable in the enterprise telephony space, as well, Schuchart writes. “Cisco’s enterprise telephony programs have the reputation of being expensive to install, complicated to configure, and cumbersome to manage,” he writes. “Cisco’s telephony solution remains complex and vulnerable to the exploits that attack its … underlying Windows operating system, while its Call Manager Express solution still lacks the feature parity with competing products.” -Stephen Swoyer