25 Facts Partners Should Know About Cisco
1. Cisco was founded in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner.
No Title
2. They started the foundation of Cisco’s bridging and routing technologies by experimenting with the connection of disparate networks across Stanford University’s campus.
No Title
3. The company’s name is an homage to San Francisco, with its long-time bridge logo a play on the Golden Gate Bridge
No Title
4. Within five years of founding, Cisco built itself up from two employees and zero revenue up to 111 employees and $27 million.
No Title
5. Cisco, which reported $47.1 billion in fiscal 2014 revenue, has more than 70,500 employees worldwide, including more than 28,000 Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) professionals.
No Title
6. Cisco has more than 70,000 channel partners worldwide.
No Title
7. Cisco extended its cloud and data center partnership with Microsoft to accelerate service delivery for cloud providers via an integrated cloud platform, announcing the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Platform.
No Title
8. Cisco has global service centers that include Raleigh-Durham, N.C; Bangalore, India; Krakow, Poland; Dalian, China; and Mexico City.
No Title
9. Since 1993, Cisco has acquired more than 170 companies.
No Title
10. Cisco spends $6.3 billion annually on R&D.
No Title
11. Gartner ranked Cisco at No. 7 on its Top 25 Supply Chain ranking in 2014, and Boston Consulting Group named Cisco one of the 50 most innovative companies, moving up the rank from 46th last year to 14th in 2015. Cisco is ranked #1 or #2 in most market segments it serves.
No Title
12. In March 2014, Cisco announced plans to build the largest global Intercloud (a network of clouds) for the IoE, and to invest more than $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years. Today, Cisco’s Intercloud partner ecosystem consists of more than 60 companies with a footprint of more than 350 data centers in 50 countries.
No Title
13. As part of Cisco’s Fast IT, a “simple, smart and secure IT model,” that takes into consideration cloud, mobility, security, and data analytics, Cisco added the Cisco WAN Automation Engine (WAE) to its Evolved Services Platform (ESP), marking a key milestone in Cisco’s network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) strategy.
No Title
14. In October 2014, Cisco expanded its fog computing portfolio with the second phase of its IOx platform for industrial-scale IoT deployments. IOx enables third-party operating systems and industry software applications to run on Cisco IoT network platforms.
No Title
15. In December 2014, Cisco launched its analytics strategy, the Cisco Connected Analytics for the IoE portfolio. The software packages provide analytics for data regardless of its location.
No Title
16. Last year, Cisco Capital committed $1 billion to provide financial solutions that help Cisco customers and partners drive the adoption of Cisco technologies needed to transition to Cisco-powered clouds.
No Title
17. Cisco also added two new virtualized and automated managed business services—Security and Cloud VPN—to its Evolved Services Platform (ESP), opening up a $62 billion market for service providers.
No Title
18. Cisco’s startup incubation program, Cisco Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR), supports early-stage business-to-business companies working on “transformational” technologies, including IoT/IoE, big data/analytics, smart cities, cloud computing and enterprise security.
No Title
19. Cisco has opened IoE innovation Centers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Spain.
No Title
20. Cisco recently revamped its Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) Routing and Switching certification. The company also revised courses for the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) Training, and added several network programmability specialist certifications. New courses target Cisco’s focus areas, including IoT, big data analytics, and SDN.
No Title
21. Cisco introduced new Service Provider Mobility Specialist certifications and updates to its CCIE Service Provider written and lab exams, targeting service provider network engineers.
No Title
22. The Cisco Networking Academy also introduced the first global IoE curriculum to address growing demand for IoE skills.
No Title
23. Cisco expanded its big data portfolio with software resale agreements with Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR for their Apache Hadoop data management capabilities.
No Title
24. Cisco recently announced offerings—the Cisco Industrial Operations Kit and the Cisco Industrial Ethernet 4000 (IE 4000) Series Switches—aimed at expanding industrial use cases for the IoT.
No Title
25. Cisco also added new application-centric capabilities to the Cisco Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) for networking service providers. EPN also ties in with Cisco’s IoT focus by giving service providers the tools to support their network infrastructure to manage M2M data.