5/8/2006 -- It just wouldn't be an Interop without an accompanying product blitz from Cisco Systems Inc. This year, Cisco's 7200 Series got a much-needed refresh designed to help enhance its bona-fides vis-a-vis competitive offerings from Juniper Networks Inc. and other scrappy up-and-comers.

Cisco last week announced three new products for its 7200 Series routers: the new Cisco 7200 Network Processing Engine (NPE-G2), Cisco 7200 VPN Services Adapter (VSA), and Cisco 7200 Port Adapter Jacket Card. Cisco says all three entries are able to deliver secure services aggregation routing at OC-3 and Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) speeds.

Analysts are optimistic about Cisco's 7200 Series product blitz. "With the introduction of the G2 [NPE]...Cisco is addressing customer demand and expectations for greater performance and delivering that solution via an in-place upgrade solution for its installed base of over 330,000 Cisco 7200 Series routers," notes Joel Conover, a principal analyst for enterprise infrastructure with Current Analysis. "The upgrade helps Cisco combat competitive attacks focused on the performance of its platforms, and gives it a great investment protection story that will make it harder for competitors to dislodge Cisco from its incumbent position."

The product refresh couldn't have come at a better time for Cisco, the market share leader in this segment, Conover argues. "[W]ith high-speed market dynamics beginning to change, Cisco needs to ensure that its platforms can scale to meet the performance demands that customers present," he writes. "Though market share numbers vary by deployment environment [service provider versus enterprise], Cisco is the dominant incumbent in the enterprise side of this market segment, with as much as 90 percent market share."

Cisco is facing especial pressure from Juniper Networks Inc., which positions its M7i as a 7200 Series upgrade option for customers that demand greater WAN aggregation performance, Conover notes. "Cisco's NPE-G2 improves the existing performance of the Cisco 7200VXR platform and also shifts the focus of the routing platform away from pure packet performance towards integrated services messaging, complementing Cisco's highly successful ISR launch of 2004," he concludes. "While this new product doesn't outperform Juniper's M7i platform in raw packets-per-second terms, it does give customers the performance boost they need to keep their networks running smoothly. That in turn gives Cisco a much stronger position from which to defend its installed base, while also enabling customers to turn up more integrated services at the aggregation layer to support a growing number of advanced edge services." -Stephen Swoyer