This post was written by Katie Bumper

Cisco will launch its first products developed specially for small businesses in January. The new products are for video surveillance, data storage and wireless office communications. Cisco said to reach small and medium businesses (SMBs), the company will embark on a campaign focusing on business capabilities and the benefits of complete solutions rather than on products and technologies. The six-month integrated campaign called “One Voice” comes on the back of Cisco’s recent announcement of a US$100 million investment in its global small business initiative.

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This post was written by Katie Bumper

Cisco has announced that its new Cisco WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) helps in reducing bandwidth requirements, data loss and the time for recovery and replication of data and for recovery. Also, it increases acceptable distance between data centers and aids regulatory compliance. The new version of this software optimizes data center replication capabilities for popular storage applications through a Replication Accelerator mode. The new technology will enable IT managers to overcome WAN bandwidth limitations when remotely replicating data over Internet Protocol (IP) networks between data centers.

This post was written by Melissa Chang

According to this article in Barron’s, Paul Wick, manager of the Seligman Communications and Information Fund, has made an interesting prediction about Cisco. According to Wick, Cisco is overdue to do a large deal - for example, going after EMC, the large corporate storage and software company. Barron’s predicts that this would be a deal in the mid-$40 billion range. From the article:

A big deal, yes, but one for which Cisco would get considerable value. EMC is a leader in enterprise storage; they also have assembled an impressive portfolio of software assets through a deliberate acquisition strategy, and now own Legato Systems (acquired in 2003), Documentum (another 2003 deal) and RSA Software (bought in 2006).

Read the full story here.