Cisco, IBM to ally

Silverpike writes "Cicso and IBM have announced that they will now partner on networking technologies. All existing IBM networking equipment will cease development and maintain support. Cisco gets IBM networking patents and preference on all new silicon devices. IBM Global Services will now also sell Cicso products. " Lotsa money exchanging hands-2 billion. Cisco starts to use more IBM custom chips, while IBM sells Cisco stuff.

Comments

Re:there goes the competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Cisco rarely buys "competition". What it tends to do is to buy companies with better technology than its own. It bought Kalpana for its switch technoloy, same with Crescendo. The original AGS was actually a SUN VME machine with odd software.

I have no problem with the way Cisco does business. If it was to buy Bay Networks off Nortel or Ascend from whoever owns them just now then that would be anticompetetive. The point is that Cisco are actually quite well behaved on the scale of things. Sure they buy a lot of companies, but these companies were never direct competition to them.

Cisco are the largest IP networking company for a good reason. Their products are good and not too expensive on the relative scale of things. Strategic alliances with Compaq, HP and now IBM can never hurt. Can you imagine what the "Microsoft IP Gigabit Router" would look like? Now stop bitching about Cisco.

Smoking Crack with a Thesaurus?

[BadlandZ]

Sorry, I don't see what your talking about. Your writing is unclear, and fails to even imply to a tangable piece of evidence.

I don't know who works for Cisco, or what thier like. But, it would take a lot more than this rubbish to make me believe something was wrong.

Simply sounds like the rantings of a lunitic. Anyone know what the heck this guy is talking about? If there is a point in there, I would like to know what it is.

A word from the trenches...

[Silverpike]

You might notice I am the one who submitted this story. I am also an employee of IBM's Networking Hardware Division, and I think I can shed some light on this "partnership."

Let me be blunt. My division has been dying a slow death for several years now, and this is the last nail in the coffin. Up until this agreement, we produced hubs, routers, and switches, which is now (almost) entirely sold to Cicso. Our division of 2000+ people are now all spending the next two weeks cleaning up our resumes.

Cicso made out like champs on this one. They have no obligation to support our old boxes, which has been kept squarely on IBM (at great support cost as well). Cisco has acquired every design aspect of our data networking products, right down to the source code.

IBM Global services, however, will sell Cicso stuff, and Cicso will make huge inroads into the Mainframe and Channel Attached markets (i.e. ESCON and parallel channel) which were previously dominated by us (for whatever that was worth).

Don't be fooled by the large $2 billion number -- they would have spent that much anyway on our chips. $2 billion over 5 years comes out to $400 million per year, which is not much for someone with volumes like Cicso. They have already been making deals with IBM Microelectronics before this was announced.

Token Ring and SNA, however, will remain the IP of IBM. There will be a small group of people left here to maintain development on these fronts, but don't expect any significant new designs on this front. Which is fine with Cicso, because these technologies aren't really going anywhere anyway.

Ironic, really, because at one point in our division's history we had the perfect opportunity to buy Cisco, lock, stock, and barrel. Needless to say we have been kicking ourselves daily for that screw up.

And on a lighter note, if anyone reading this is interested in hiring a hardware systems/low level code design engineer, mail me here :).