It will be interesting to watch the investment community try to read the tea leaves on this one. It’s probably safe to say the Mr. Giancarlo does not anticipate a big jump in Cisco’s stock price for the near term. Giancarlo’s next role is as managing director at the investment firm Silver Lake.

Giancarlo joined Cisco 14 years ago when it bought Ethernet switch maker Kalpana. He started Cisco’s business development organization and spearheaded its aggressive acquisition strategy, even in the lean years following the dot-com crash of 2000.

During the conference call, Chambers and Giancarlo were affable and nostalgic about their long working relationship — but they never minced words: Chambers said he has little intention of stepping down in the near future; he emphasized that he would remain CEO for at least three years, more likely five.

Meanwhile, Giancarlo alluded to his ambitions to be at the helm of a company, and he was frank about the shrewd calculations he made about his career after turning 50 this year.

“I went home one day and talked to my wife and said, ‘Honey, I now know what you mean by a biological clock,’” Giancarlo said. “I feel young, but you do the math: I don’t know what my decision process will be in five years, but I know what it is today.” (from Yahoo)

I’m hesitant to buy into gloom and doom predictions, but I think the IP address shortage is a real possibility. I still won’t buy into the crash and burn theories for the internet, but it looks like IPv6 will be a necessity sooner rather than later. Quoting Jim Bound, IPv6 Task Force Chairman in an interview with Network World.

The IPv6 community is now talking about 2010 as the date for IPv4 address exhaustion. Is that date real?

It is very real. It could be plus or minus one year. The consensus is that we have two to four years until we run out of IPv4 addresses. It’s hard to predict how the usage will work. It’s been sporadic over the years. If you go to the IPv6 Forum Web site, you’ll see a counter that shows how much time we feel is left.

It’s very likely the average user will not notice any change if the switch is made. If made, it will create a upgrade rush that is likely to benefit a number of enterprises like Cisco.

Cisco is wrapping up its acquisiton of Navini Networks. Barring in any last minute hitches, the deal should be complete before years end. Navini Networks has had reasonable success in the overseas markets in providing WiMax infrastructure products. —

US$330 million acquisition of WiMax wireless provider Navini Networks Inc. should be completed in a matter of days, helping bring Cisco closer to its intention of bringing wireless broadband to emerging countries.

The planned acquisition of the Richardson, Tex.-based Navini, announced in October, was billed as a means “to drive broadband penetration to consumers and business in emerging countries,” according to a press release issued Oct. 23.

However, Cisco is not ruling out the possibility that WiMax sales opportunities will open up in other markets including the U.S., said Brett Galloway, general manager of wireless networking at Cisco in a short interview at C-Scape 2007, a Cisco analyst conference. “We’ll go where the business is,” Galloway said.

Linky.

Cisco has never made its fortunes by living on the bleeding edge. Rather the company has been successful getting behind a technology when it is ready for the corporate mainstream. Video and interactivity are certainly nothing new to most casual internet users, but they have largely been absent as corporate tools or as apps that service providers have been eager to enable.

Cisco at its C-Scape conference in San Jose beat the collaboration drum in laying out its strategy and vision for the future of networking, with video playing a key part of collaboration.

But while Facebook, MySpace and other Web 2.0 technologies are pushing network service providers like AT&T to deploy major upgrades today, those same technologies are not a network growth driver in the enterprise today. (from eweek)

It would appear that high quality video in the interactive space will be just as pervasive as text messaging in the near future. Access providers should heed this warning.

Om Malik is reporting that EX Moto CTO who’s departure was confirmed today has joined Cisco in a similar role. (From GigaOm)

With the recent departure of Motorola’s CEO, it is beginning to look like an exodus from Motorola could be on the way.

Don’t get me wrong I love the Register! They poke fun at the upper crust of the IT industry, which is richly deserved. Even when they are having fun they present a kernel of truth. Then sometimes they lay a bomb. But that’s the nature of being a comic, you can’t hit every joke out of the theatre.

Here’s the problem with the analysis:

• All sorts of dark fiber is lying around major metropolitan centers of the US. Most of it going unused. Most was laid during the 99-00 time frame of Internet Gold Rush I. Tapped we’re talking TB of capacity.
• AT&T and Verizon are betting billions on the rollout of FTTH. Depending on what you want you can get 100mb/1Gb/20Gb from them now. Verizon just finished a test of 100Gbs over the same residential fiber. And folks that does not even consider doing color frequency based multiplexing over the same fiber.
• DSL is slowly being bumped in speed both here and on the other side of the pond. Read the bottom of the article. BT is increasing bandwidth as needed. Technology is not the limitied factor right now. Price points are.
• Now if we want we could open up the MBone network on the internet backbone. We would have to tariff it so that the interbackbone providers can assure scaling of the service. But even here there is an existing infrastructure that could be applied to the problem. Akami might need to participate in that cash stream. But with the right arrangements they too can scale up. With appropriate forward caching of content long haul data can be managed.

There is plenty of intervening technology and resources yet untapped. Let’s not press the panic button yet, ok?

This article is pretty concise in what is going to be happening over the next couple of years for the Wireless scene. The critical graph is here –

Heck, just forget about cell phones altogether, added World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director and One Web guru Tim Berners-Lee, also speaking at the conference. According to the Web pioneer, consumer technology is moving toward a world in which all devices will be covered in changeable pixels that can be used to present messages and content — sort of a Times Square-like scenario.

“So, the screen is getting less and less important,” he said.

For those unaware Berners-Lee for all intents and purposes is the father of the Web not Gore. But his observations have a larger portent than fancy screens. In order for the world to be viewing this new future will require at least one more turn at the wireless transport infrastructure. WiMax as good as it is, would not have the bandwidth for that level of video transport. Cisco and Nortel will love this.

Cisco Systems acquired Navini Networks a WiMax technology provider. As is typical of Cisco, its a stake in expected growth of WiMax products and services. Cisco has been very keen in knowing not only winning technology trends but when to jump in and with who.

Linky.

Navini is a pioneer in “smart beamforming” technologies. It also uses multiple-input multiple-output, or MIMO, antennas. The combination of the technologies improves the speed of the data transmission and the range of WiMax radios. Overall, the technology lowers deployment and operational costs for network service providers because fewer radios are needed to transmit the wireless signals. (from Cnet)