What's He Building In There?

Tom Waits fans know the title of this post as one of his pieces and one that was used in the Enron documentary "The Smartest Guys In the Room." There's a YouTube video of the Waits piece here, if you're interested. Doing some research recently, the first couple lines of the song - if one can call it that - started playing in my head as I began contemplating what Cisco is planning for its upcoming, and much publicized 11/11/08 release. I've been piecing together some things I'm seeing in emails and Cisco blog posts and they're definitely building something "in there" in San Jose. The question is, "what is it?"

Teaser emails talking about a four year evolution toward a product that will be "summed up in a fraction of a second" started making their way into inboxes this week, paired with some mock "media attention" on one of Cisco's blogs, The Platform. 

I have to hand it to Cisco, while they may not generate the type of buzz or pre-release interest of a Steve Jobs speech at WWDC or even the more recent anticipation of the newest device coming from a carrier - this month the Blackberry Storm - but they've managed to create some intriguing speculation on what it is that they're planning to announce?

At Forrester, we decided we'd bite. We have no advanced knowledge of the announcement, but we're making the call that, given the relative scarceness of product announcements in Cisco's 10000 series router line, and the description of the to-be-announced product as:

"a revolutionary telecommunications product that will enable service providers to capitalize on a major market opportunity being created by the accelerating growth of both video and mobile data traffic."

...that it's going to be a revamp of service-provider, edge routers.

So, that's our guess, what's yours? I guess we'll all see in a couple of weeks, for sure.

By Chris Silva

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