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Targeting more sales in a span of two years, Chinese telecom gear maker <keyword id="110306" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Huawei-Technologies">Huawei Technologies</keyword> would manufactures its enterprise products at its Chennai plant. The company's India enterprise business revenue increased almost by 50% during the last financial year, thus it eyes a 10-fold jump in the revenue by March 2017. 
 
"We expect revenues to reach $300 million in the next two years. Once we hit the $100-million mark, we would start manufacturing enterprise products in India itself," Kent Tang Kai, sales director-north region, Enterprise Business Department, Huawei, told the Economic Times. 
 
Presently, the Chennai facility is being used to make telecom network equipment for the Indian market. 
 
Kai said the company's business revenue grew 48% during the last financial year to $30 million in India. Its overall revenue from the South Asian nation stood at $1 billion, and the company expects to double its overall revenue to $2 billion by 2016-17. 
 
Moreover, Huawei is targeting internet service providers/telcos, energy, transportation, media, BFSI, and education verticals for its enterprise solutions and services in India. 
 It has around 30 enterprise customers in India, including DEN Networks, Hathway, QTel, <keyword id="6377547" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Adidas">Adidas</keyword>, Taj Hotel, <keyword id="35140" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="BSE">BSE</keyword> and <keyword id="94550" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Tata-Sky">Tata Sky</keyword>, and competes with the likes of Cisco, Juniper, EMC and <keyword id="6367983" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="HP">HP</keyword>. 
 
Huawei, through its enterprise division, is also targeting the country's 100 Smart Cities and Digital India projects, and is currently in talks with state and central governments along with private companies for tie-ups. 
 
(Image: Reuters)

Huawei on expansion mode! May make enterprise products at Chennai

Cisco Live/Business InsiderCisco CEO Chuck RobbinsCisco did some bargain shopping this week when it acquired a startup called <a href="http://investor.cisco.com/investor-relations/news-and-events/news/news-details/2017/Cisco-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-Viptela/default.aspx">Viptela for $610 million.</a>Just one year ago, Viptela was valued at $900 million by its investors, according to the database that tracks such things, <a href="https://my.pitchbook.com/#page/profile_1886807354">Pitchbook.</a>The startup had raised over $108 million in venture funding from VCs like Sequoia, and it achieved that valuation when it raised $75 million in May, 2016, led by European and Russian VC Redline Capital Management.The sudden sale of such a hot startup, and the discount price, has not gone unnoticed among Silicon Valley VCs and tech industry insiders trying to gauge the health of the enterprise startup scene.We've talked to two sources close to the company who described a promising business with decent sales but a variety of problems that opened the door for Cisco to walk in and snatch it at a bargain price."There was internal dysfunction, and investor dysfunction," one person told us. <h2>Founders and investors made millions</h2>Viptela offers a way for companies to connect remote offices to their corporate networks using Viptela's router and software hosted in the cloud. It was considered a market leader in a new area called software-defined wide area networking or SDWAN. That's a new way to build networks that relies on software to do fancy control functions.According to one source inside the company, the board sold the company on the cheap mostly because making sales in its niche of wide area networking was hard, competition was rising and the co-founders were running out of steam to build it into a long-term independent company. The founders wanted to see the technology be successful, and it might have a better shot at thriving inside of Cisco.Meanwhile, Cisco's offer was enough for the cofounders to walk with multi-millions, and all the investors to make money, even the late-stage investors. They had a clause in their agreement that protected them if the company sold for less than their valuation. All the investors made money, both sources told us."The only people to get screwed were the employees who joined in last year, everyone that came on near their unicorn-level valuation, they got caught," one person told us.This is, however, a typical risk for employees who join a more established startup. They typically get less equity and more of a chance that their stock won't be worth much if the company's value drops.<a href="https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/cisco-acquires-viptela/">Sequoia</a>The Viptela founding team signs their series A term sheet at Sequoia in 2012 (left to right) Back: Venu Hemige, Khalid Raza. Front: Atif Khan, Amir Khan, Ramesh Prabagaran<h2>Not a Trojan horse for Cisco</h2>Viptela was a startup founded by a team of accomplished engineers from Cisco, Juniper Networks and Alcatel Lucent which had been turning <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2873608/sdn/viptela-brings-software-defined-wans-to-the-enterprise.html">heads in its niche.</a> Rumors had <a href="https://www.cloudgenix.com/should-cisco-acquire-viptela/">been swirling for at least a couple of days</a> that this deal was in the works.Interestingly, four months ago, Viptela hired a new CEO, a man named Praveen Akkiraju. He was famous in his circle as a long-time Cisco engineer who became the CEO of a contentious joint venture between Cisco and EMC known as VCE. When the relationship between Cisco, EMC and VMware devolved, EMC bought out Cisco's interest in VCE. But Cisco retained a 10% stake and it got to put its own guy - Akkiraju -in as CEO. After Dell swallowed EMC, including VCE, Akkiraju was basically out of a job. He landed at Viptela in January.One rumor says he was brought in just to orchestrate a sale to Cisco, but both people we talked to told us this wasn't the case. At the time he was hired, he was expected to be a long-time CEO.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvmazAtLjyI&amp;feature=player_embedded">YouTube/CiscoSP360 </a>Praveen AkkirajuOne person told us that the real reason for the change was fractures inside the company that would have been a lot for him, an outsider, to fix.The two co-founders were having disagreements, sources told us. On one side was Khalid Raza the cofounding CTO and on the other was Amir Khan, the co-founding CEO (who became president after Akkiraju joined) and his brother Atif Khan, who was running the sales engineering department. Meanwhile, the company's key investor and board member was Michael Goguen. Goguen was a partner at Sequoia that had funded the first two rounds of the company, about $33 million. But in March, 2016, <a href="https://twitter.com/sequoia/status/708549364428316672">Sequoia fired him, it said,</a> after a lawsuit alleging sexual abuse was filed against him. He gave up all his board seats, <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/13/fired-sequoia-partner-will-forfeit-board-seats-source.html">CNBC reported.</a><h2>New threats</h2>Viptela wasn't failing. It had landed 25 Fortune 500 enterprises as customers and deals with carriers like Verizon and Singtel who used its product to sell cloud networking products to other big companies, it said.One person told us that Viptela had grown itself into about $25 million of revenue. Based on that, Cisco's price was more than fair. "These guys did $25 million in revenue for last year and sold for over $600 million. A $610 million exit? That's a great story," this person told us.<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-goguen-23314">LinkedIn</a>Michael GoguenBut competition was growing in the field and Viptela needed strong, solid leadership and a board that believed in them to fend off the threats. There were startups like Aryaka, Versa Networks and CloudGenix, for instance. And Cisco had invested in a competitor, too, VeloCloud.Plus, Cisco had a couple of its own competing products, such as a product called "Intelligent WAN" or iWAN. And Cisco had bought a startup called Meraki for $1.2 billion a couple of years ago. Meraki is mostly known for its wireless LANs, but was being used by small businesses to connect remote offices to cloud apps, too.All told, when Viptela went looking for a sale, it wasn't in a position of negotiating strength. Even so, most analysts believe the Viptela's technology will be a good fit for Cisco's iWAN products, helping it sell more networking software to enterprises and service providers. Cisco is trying to remake itself into more of a software company, so this purchase could be great for Cisco.While the whole Viptela team is joining Cisco, it's unclear if both founders will be going to Cisco as well. Viptela declined to comment, Cisco did not return a request for comment. Get the latest Cisco stock price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/stock/csco-Quote"> here.</a> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/marines-corps-machine-gun-wielding-robot-controlled-by-tablet-2017-4">The Marine Corps is testing a machine gun-wielding robot controlled with just a tablet and a joystick</a></h3> Please enable Javascript to watch this video

How Cisco bought a $900 million startup for just $610 million

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Michael Seto/Business InsiderAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos</div></div></div>If you want to understand just how powerful Amazon has become by turning the <a href="http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3084817">$3.5 trillion global IT industry</a> on its head, here's a clue.In October, Amazon threw its third annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas for its Amazon Web Services customers. One of the highlights was a two-hour keynote from Andy Jassy, the senior VP in charge of AWS. His message to big companies was clear: come use Amazon, we're finally, really ready for you.And the highlight of that keynote came <a href="https://reinvent.awsevents.com/">1:08:47 in</a> when Jassy stood in front a slide that listed 19 large well-known companies who are going "all-in" on Amazon."All-in" means they've made the gutsy decision to shut down all of their own private data centers and instead run their companies on the rented computers, storage, software and other services served up by AWS. Check out the companies on the list:<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Amazon" title_caption="Amazon Andy Jassy " all="" in="" enterprises="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/56953f21e6183ebe4a8b8741-960/amazon-all-in2.png"></a><a href="https://reinvent.awsevents.com/">Amazon</a>Amazon Andy Jassy "all in" enterprises</div></div></div>Notice anything? The companies come from all over the business world, including the tech industry.We talked to the folks responsible for the "all-in" AWS projects at three huge tech companies: Netflix, accounting software company Intuit, and networking giant Juniper, about why they chose to turn to Amazon.They all believe that they are role models and that, over the next decade or so, more big enterprises will do the same."When the data center comes up for lease, what people are doing is looking at, 'I could spend a big pile of money to refit it, or I could replace it with an AWS account'," explains Adrian Cockcroft, formerly Netflix's cloud architect, the man who oversaw Netflix's use of Amazon through 2014. He is now a Technology Fellow advisor for VC firm Battery Ventures. (Netflix declined comment for this article, although it does talk publicly about its use of AWS <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/10/netflix-at-aws-reinvent-2015.html">at Amazon's re:Invent conference.</a>)The implications are clear. If these tech companies can unplug all of their data centers and switch to AWS, any company can do the same."I think in some ways AWS is helping to redefine the industry. That's one of the reasons we're happy to be partnering with them in this, because we think we're riding with one of the leaders in the industry," says Intuit's Michele Iacovone, SVP and Chief Architect.<h2>Netflix: "A shark swimming in a paddling pool"</h2>AWS didn't start out as a force in <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> for cloud computing. Quite the opposite.AWS launched in 2006, and by 2009 it was mostly used by startups, who liked its dirt-cheap prices.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Business Insider</div></div></div>When Netflix started using AWS not many other enterprises were even considering it. And for good reason. AWS wasn't very good."In 2009, when Netflix first started, Amazon was a very crappy data center," Cockcroft remembers."It was small. It was unreliable. All kinds of things weren't there. We were basically helping create what's there now by making it clear to AWS 'if you do this, this will work' and 'this doesn't work' and 'we need this feature'," he says.Netflix was so much more demanding on AWS than its other customers, mostly startups, it was like "a shark swimming in a paddling pool," he says. "There were times when when Netflix figured out it was biggest users of some Amazon feature because we kept breaking it," he told us.Netflix would even get others to use some of those features to get more people to complain to AWS that the feature needed fixing.<h2>Despite those headaches, Netflix was determined to make it work</h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Battery VenturesBattery Ventures technology fellow Adrian Cockcroft</div></div></div>But Netflix didn't want to get stuck running their own data centers, Cockcroft says."Was that a competitive advantage for Netflix? And the summary from on down was, if we could offload that to somebody else, we will. We want to own the software, because that's key to us. But we don't need to own the hardware," he recalls.In 2010, Netflix started talking about the decision to go all-in on AWS, <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/four-reasons-we-choose-amazons-cloud-as.html">published a blog on it</a>. The entire IT industry thought Netflix was nuts."I did a talk at a conference at the end of 2010 to 100 people or so. The reaction of the audience: 'you guys are crazy.' No one in the cloud computing community were doing anything as ambitious as what we were doing on AWS," Cockcroft laughs. (Side note: one of the Battery Ventures partners attended that talk. And, years later, that partner offered him his current job at Battery.)But no one is laughing now. In mid-2015, after more than five years of work, Netflix closed its last major data center.Analysts expect Netflix to report <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ae?s=NFLX+Analyst+Estimates">around $6.78 billion in revenue</a> for 2015, up from about $5.5 billion, when it releases it earnings on January 19. Cockcroft credits much of its growth to not spending millions on data centers."Netflix has a very different business model," with almost all of its revenue invested in licensing and creating movie content. It spends on marketing and salaries, "but the proportion Netflix spends on IT is relatively low," he says.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/helgethomas/17198940389/">Helge Thomas/flickr</a></div></div></div><h2>Intuit: "It wasn't all roses at the beginning"</h2>A funny thing happened along the way. As the startups on AWS grew up, including Netflix, so did Amazon.Instead of ditching Amazon for their own data centers, the reverse started happening. More and more giant enterprises started using AWS as a way to ditch their own data centers.In addition to the ones going all-in, many more are using AWS to close just some of their data centers, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1yW6vWCpgk">GE</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E90-ExySb8">Capital One</a> (who appeared on stage with Jassy last fall).<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">IntuitIntuit SVP Chief Architect, Michele Iacovone</div></div></div>Even with Netflix leading the way, it wasn't easy for any of the early companies using AWS. Amazon at first didn't really get them or their plans, and didn't make itself easy to work with, remembers Intuit's SVP and chief architect Michele Iacovone.Intuit chose to go 100% into AWS because, thanks to some acquisitions, it found itself loaded with a bunch of small data centers on top of its two main ones for its core business.Meanwhile, it was revamping its own software to run on the cloud and it wanted its programmers working in the cloud, too. Work went faster when not waiting on an overloaded IT department to buy and provision servers and software.When Intuit did a pilot with Amazon, AWS still "wasn't ready for enterprise," Iacovone tells us. For instance, Amazon didn't have things like enterprise-grade computer security (super important for a financial services company like Intuit, which makes software for taxes, bookkeeping, loans). And AWS couldn't do the kind of tracking/auditing Intuit needed.Still, Intuit decided to try AWS anyway. It found an application to could use as a test, a self-help app called <a href="https://turbotax.intuit.com/best-tax-software/why-choose-turbotax/help-live-community.jsp">Live Community</a>, where power users of Intuit's tax software answered others' questions.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Amazon re:InventAWS revenue "run-rate"</div></div></div>Intuit's developers shocked themselves at how fast they moved the app to AWS: a little over two months, instead of the expected half a year, Iacovone says.For tax season, they put the app on a big bunch of AWS servers. Suddenly, the app could stretch to handle the giant volume of questions that hit it during tax season, cutting Intuit's customer support calls by half. When tax season ended, Intuit simply "decommissioned" most of the servers and gave them back to AWS. The project took "1/5 the effort" and cut infrastructure costs by 20%, and cut Intuit's overall costs "by 6x," Iacovone describes.Intuit decided to go all-in with Amazon.<h2>Intuit promptly hit more brick walls</h2>AWS's contract at the time reflected a consumer company's ignorance of enterprise IT. "Things like indemnification and standard enterprise clauses were foreign to Amazon," he says. "It took a long time to work through it with them and make sure we had a contract that made sense."Once that was done, Intuit pressured and worked with AWS to build the kind of security, auditing, and other features they needed."It wasn't all roses at the beginning," he laughs.But it's gotten much better. Intuit has since moved "50 or 60 or so smaller apps and projects," to Amazon and at least one huge one, Mint, the SaaS personal financial app it bought in 2009 for $179 million.Iacovone expects it will take Intuit another 2 to 3 years to get the rest of their apps into AWS.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">IntuitIntuit cloud IT team from left to right: Tim Fleming, Matt Turner, Piyush Kotecha, Steve Lin, Michele Iacovone, Raju Chithambaram, Merline Saintil, Ivan Lazarov, Brian Ellison</div></div></div><h2>Juniper: Saving money is a byproduct</h2>None of these three "all-in" companies are moving to Amazon just to save money.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Juniper NetworksJuniper Networks CTO Gary Clark</div></div></div>Juniper VP and CTO Gary Clark led the decision to go all-in on cloud computing about four years ago, and about three years ago, he chose Amazon as his go-to data center for all of Juniper's home-grown apps.And just a few days ago they closed their 17th data center, and only have one left, Clark told us."We've gone farther, faster than many. There's been some bumpy roads for sure. But we're in way better position than we were three years ago," he tells us.For instance, Juniper badly needed to update a sprawling war chest of some 300 software apps spread across the 18 data centers. So about four years ago, Juniper's IT department did an exercise they called "let's move to the cloud" where they imagined not having any data centers.After taking inventory of their apps the company, half of them could be replaced with SaaS versions that "offered some pretty good value," Clark said. With SaaS, apps always stay updated, no need for the IT department to deal with that."I thought, if you can move it to SaaS, why the heck aren't you doing it?," he said. So Juniper signed up for apps like Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Concur for expense management, and ServiceNow for the helpdesk. The problem child was the decade-old Oracle ERP application (the financial and supply chain management app) that badly needed updating.So Clark and team embarked in a three-year project to move to a cloud-friendly ERP system. Just a few days ago, his team officially launched it new SAP ERP app this month. (It is not running on Amazon, he says, but on a service offered by the partner that helped build it.)Finally, there was another group of 150 other apps that did "all this other stuff." These were the custom apps running various parts of Juniper's business, like getting quotes from partners, etc. And all of those are being moved to AWS in a project that started three years ago.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Thomson Reuters</div></div></div>Juniper, a company that makes computer network equipment, had one big technical advantage. It built a brand new network that lets it access all its apps as fast as if they were still its own private data center, he says. That's one of the reasons it could move so fast.Still, the upshot is in three years, Juniper moved from less than 1% in the cloud to 85% of its IT in the cloud and from 18 data centers to 1.While Juniper didn't "save money" per se, Clark says that as Juniper's business has grown, his IT budget and headcount has stayed the same, about 300 people."And we've improved service delivery dramatically," he says with everyone experiencing a lot less downtime.<h2>Google and Microsoft are in the chase</h2>While Amazon is leading this "all-in" revolution, everyone is watching two potential competitors: Microsoft and Google.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">APDiane Greene</div></div></div>"Google has made some very interesting advances," says Intuit's Iacovone. "And Microsoft Azure if you have a large Microsoft footprint is compelling," he says, adding that Intuit is not a big Microsoft user.Iacovone remains committed to Amazon, but every six months, his team takes a serious look at the competition.Former Netflix cloud architect Cockcroft also thinks that Microsoft is hot on Amazon's heels."Microsoft is a pretty complete cloud platform and it's more business friendly than AWS and in more locations worldwide," he notes. Physical location of cloud players is increasingly important for global enterprises, as many countries have laws that forbid data from being stored in other countries.Meanwhile, he likens Google to about where Amazon was five years ago."Google is interesting," he says and "it knows how to run stuff at scale." He says. But Google's cloud is small, and they "don't have an enterprise sales and support force in place, like Amazon five years ago. They don't have the corporate culture for it."He thinks that's why Google hired board member <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hires-diane-greene-to-run-cloud-2015-11">Diane Greene</a> to run its new cloud unit and create some enterprise DNA. <h2>Big IT companies have een put on notice</h2>Meanwhile the growing list of Amazon "all-in" companies should really terrify the big IT hardware giants, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Dell and its soon to be subsidiary EMC, Cisco, and even Oracle.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"> REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui </div></div></div>This is the beginning what's sure to be a long and potentially devastating trend for them, Cockcroft says, who describes these companies as "sinking ships." "One by one, companies are shrinking their data center footprint," he says.Meanwhile, Amazon doesn't buy loads of commercial servers and storage equipment from those companies. It mostly builds its own. (Amazon now even <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3055214/amazon-has-just-become-a-chip-maker">owns its own ARM chip company</a>, though that may more about building mobile devices than AWS equipment.)Same with Microsoft and Google.While sales of servers, storage, and other data center equipment to enterprises will never dry up, Cockcroft believes cloud vendors generally, and Amazon in particular, will devour a bigger chunk of it <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25946315">faster than pundits predict.</a>"Amazon is only few percentage points of the total data center spend. So they don't have a big percentage of the market, yet. By 2018, they'll have a larger multiple," he says. He points to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-growth-rate-is-far-outpacing-other-enterprise-vendors-2015-12">AWS's 78% overall growth rate</a> and says he believes AWS is growing its revenue from enterprises even faster than that.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE-hU">Amazon</a></div></div></div>The main reason: Companies can't afford to build for themselves the state-of-the-art data center that matches what AWS has built, he says.In the meantime, thanks to help from early adopters like Intuit, Juniper and Netflix, Amazon is no enterprise neophyte anymore. It now has an abundance of enterprise-grade features and appropriate contracts, sales and support. Plus, it's adding new enterprise features at a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10">blinding pace</a>. Discount retailer that it is, it also continually cuts prices. Earlier this month it <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/happy-new-year-ec2-price-reduction-c4-m4-and-r3-instances/">announced its 51st price cut</a> since AWS launched.All of that makes the companies who have gone "all-in" feel content with their choice.Juniper's Clark believes Amazon still offers the best bang for the buck. "We went to Amazon because its leadership in the marketplace was clear to us," he says, and its constant stream of new features proves it isn't "stuck" in the past and letting others leapfrog it.Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

Netflix, Juniper and Intuit explain how Amazon is eating the $3.5 trillion IT industry

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Cisco/Business InsiderCisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg</div></div></div>Cisco and Ericcson on Monday announced a huge new partnership that they believe will generate $1 billion for each company by 2018.Each of them had to do something to combat the merger mania going on all around them.This partnership is a direct response to Nokia's $17 billion purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, announced in April. Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent were two of Ericcson's biggest rivals in providing equipment to the telecommunications industry.Cisco competes with all of these companies as well.What's telling is that Cisco, under its new CEO Chuck Robbins, chose this partnership arrangement, instead of using some of its approximately $62 billion in cash to buy part or all of Ericcson, which has a $32 billion market cap. Cisco has reportedly been in talks with Ericcson for the past 13 months, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/3003133/cloud-computing/cisco-ericsson-team-up-as-industry-consolidates.html">reports Nework World's Jim Duffy</a>. <h2>Why the deal makes sense for Cisco</h2>There were plenty of <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/ericsson-juniper-are-next-as-nokia-wakes-up-industry-real-m-a">rumors and speculation that someone would buy Ericcson</a> after the Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent deal was announced, and Cisco was a likely candidate, as the two companies seem to fit together. Cisco is a leader in computer networking equipment and is particularly strong in selling its gear to businesses and government. Ericcson is best known for computer networking equipment that builds wireless networks, and is particularly strong in selling its gear to service providers (telecoms, mainly). Ericsson also is known for its big consulting services unit.Meanwhile, Cisco also needed to do something to counter the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/making-sense-of-dell-emc-vmware-2015-10">merger of Dell and EMC</a>, which will create a powerhouse in the <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> server/storage market, with a goal of grabbing away some of Cisco's networking market as well.And Cisco needs a European ally to battle Chinese networking powerhouse Huawei Technologies, who has been signing up deals with European service providers like it was chowing down potato chips - 15 in 2015 as of the summer, and about as many in 2014, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/17/huawei-says-europe-is-like-a-second-home-market/">the Wall Street Journal reports.</a>So a union between the two companies makes sense. But Robbins isn't going for the big splashy acquisition at this point. He's into partnerships, he explained in a blog post, pointing out out that this is the third big partnership under his tenure.The first was with Apple, where Cisco will build networks that work better with iOS devices; then came <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28865646/cisco-100-million-joint-venture-chinas-inspur-group">Cisco's $100 million joint venture with China's Inspur Group </a>to give Cisco a piece of China's growing cloud computing action. There was <a href="http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300076558/partners-to-ericsson-stay-away-from-juniper.htm">also some speculation that Ericcson</a> would counter the Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent deal by buying its Cisco's rival, Juniper Networks. Ericcson and Juniper have long been partners. There's no telling where this partnership with Cisco will leave Juniper, and investors are worried. Juniper's stock is tanking, <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=Juniper+ticker">down about 8%.</a> Cisco and Ericcson will be reselling each other's products and jointly developing new products for a bunch of up-and-coming new network equipment markets.These new markets include:<ul><li>The Internet of Things, where everyday objects get chips and sensors to connect to each other and to various software programs for functions like data collection.</li><li>Software-defined networking; a new way of building computer networks that uses software to control the network and uses less hardware and/or less-expensive varieties of hardware;</li><li>"Network-function virtualization" which is all the rage in service provider networks these days, where various "network functions" become software apps (such as "load balancers" that make networks perform more efficiently, or firewalls.)</li></ul> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robohon-japanese-smartphone-tech-projector-robot-humanoid-2015-10">This new robot smartphone dances, responds to voice commands, and has a built-in projector</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Z5a25ieDqYM-xdHZFqmUVPtpZg8kIMxH" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Cisco and Ericsson say their new partnership will bring them a $1 billion apiece

A few months ago, Surya Panditi was living in a nightmare but today he has happily reinvented himself as a cofounder of not one, but two, consumer tech startups.
Earlier this year, he was working as Cisco's&#xa0;<a href="http://newsroom.cisco.com/execbio-detail?articleId=532851">senior vice president and general manager of the Service Provider Networking Group</a>, a unit responsible for some of the company's most advanced networking products. 
<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ciscos-surya-panditi-fights-troll-2014-7">Someone had posted a website about him filled with libelous accusations</a> about his personal and professional life. We won't repeat them, but will say they involved his romantic and work-related relationships. They also included the name and photo of another innocent person.
Panditi had been struggling to get this website removed for about two years, but was caught in the Catch-22 of such anonymous sites. He wrote to Wordpress and even Google and got no response. 
Sites like Wordpress generally won't remove controversial websites without a court order, Wordpress&#xa0;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ciscos-surya-panditi-fights-troll-2014-7">confirmed to Business Insider at the time</a>. And the courts won't issue such orders until the anonymous person can be found, or at least a legally expensive manhunt and attempt to find the person was completed. 
So,&#xa0;Panditi threw up his hands, hired a lawyer and launched that manhunt. In the process he tried to unmask a Cisco whistleblower, known as Corporate Renegade, who was famous within the company for leaking gossip to Cisco blogger Brad Reese.&#xa0; 
We caught up Panditi recently. He told us he never found the anonymous troll, and&#xa0;<a href="http://www.bradreese.com/blog/11-24-2014.htm#comment-1732620222">Corporate Renegade's secret identity remains intact.</a> But he was successful in getting the website removed.
 On top of that, after Business Insider first told his story, it went viral and he recieved a surprise outpouring of support from others, who also benefited from this mission. 
"I was contacted by a vice president of another large company in the Valley who had a similar experience," he said. "The bigger story is when you can anonymously say things that are untrue, there's not a whole lot people can do. In Europe, there are 'right to be forgotten" laws. We don't have those."
As part of his original mission to find the troll, Panditi uncovered 24 similar websites filled with similar accusations about other executives. These were others that worked at Cisco, as well as people employed by EMC, Ericsson, HP, Juniper, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec.
Since his fight began, all 24 of those websites have been removed, a search of them conducted by Business Insider has shown.
If that wasn't a happy enough ending, there's more. Earlier this month, Panditi publicly launched one of two new consumer startups he's since cofounded. (He <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2824446/cisco-subnet/cisco-reorgs-trimming-svp-ranks.html">left Cisco in October</a>&#xa0;when Cisco undertook a massive reorg that reportedly affected 25,000 people.)
By December, he was up and running <a href="%20https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fancify-keyboard/id930654563?mt=8https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fancify-keyboard/id930654563?mt=8">with Fancify</a>, a keyboard app for the iPhone that lets you beautify a text message with special fonts, colors graphics.&#xa0; Although the first step is an app, Panditi tells us that he hopes Fancify becomes s platform that can do for texting what graphics did for email.
He's also working on a second startup, still in stealth, in the travel industry.
He's feeling happy, he tells us. Having spent most of his career selling computer equipment to enterprises he likes learning about the consumer side of the tech industry.
"I've made a significant change in my life, reinventing myself in a later stage in career."
And it feels pretty good to vanquish a troll along the way.

How A Cisco Exec Vanquished An Internet Troll And Saved 25 People

<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image">ReutersCloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince</div></div>CloudFlare, best known for its cloud cyber-security service, is growing at a mind-boggling pace. 
Over the last three years, CloudFlare has grown 450% annually, and is currently adding about 5,000 new clients a day, Matthew Prince, its programmer/lawyer-turned-founder, tells us 
It is now handling the equivalent of roughly 5% of the entire web's traffic through its servers and, just as <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-a-monster-in-the-making-2012-2">we predicted in 2012,</a> CloudFlare is indeed a monster company in the making. 
Prince is on a mission to 'build a better Internet.' To do so, CloudFlare's technology serves as what many call the "digital bouncer" for its 2 million-plus client websites. That means it fights off malicious hacker attacks. 
But CloudFlare is bigger than just a cyber-security firm. It also improves a website's performance by offering classic networking services like routing and switching (helping computers connect over the Internet), load balancing (making sure computer servers don't get overloaded), and performance acceleration (helping websites run faster) among other things. It is essentially creating a cloud service that parallels the features of many of Cisco's hardware products. 
Prince wrote his college thesis on "Why the Internet was a fad" (which he now calls "embarrassing") but his experience working on the Internet from its early days made him realize the "incredibly disruptive" potential of it. Now he wants to help the Internet live up to its promise - a place he calls, "where anyone, anywhere can publish information and get access to that information."
We had a chance to catch up with Prince and ask more about his company's explosive growth. The below interview has been edited for clarity.
Business Insider: Why is your company growing so fast?
Matthew Prince: The honest answer is we don't entirely know. We have done almost no marketing, we have a nascent sales team, but we have a large client base from Fortune 50 financial services to national governments across the world. Just this week, we added Reddit, the 17th largest site in the U.S. If we added up all the page views of our customers' sites, then we would have over 400 billion page views a month.
BI: What's drawing people to your service?
MP: We made resources that were previously only used by big companies like Google available to everyone online. The initial interest in CloudFlare is for security, but that's only for about 25% of our customers. Another 25% want to get more out of their infrastructure, and the rest of our users sign up because they want access to our analytics and other ancillary services. 
BI: For those who don't fully understand your service, what's a good comparison?
MP: If you asked, "What company are you disrupting?" and if you made me just pick one, I think it would be Cisco. If you look at the entire Cisco line - routing and switching, load balancing, security, DDoS mitigation, performance acceleration, all of these functionalities - that's what CloudFlare is doing. But instead of selling you a box to do that, we're providing you a service, which is extremely easy to provision and deploy. It's the same as Amazon Web Services taking, for example, what HP used to sell you as a box and deploying it as a cloud service. 
BI: I'm still confused. So your service basically builds a cloud firewall in front of your clients' websites and protects it from attacks?
MP: That's actually only for security, which is a meaningful part of the business. But you first have to understand how the current Internet business is changing. There are three core tiers to any Internet infrastructure. The base at the bottom is the store and compute level. In the past, HP, Dell, EMC, IBM and thousands of different companies would sell you a box and you would store your data there. Now, we've got AWS and god willing someone else, but we're not going to have thousands of different vendors anymore. It's going to be a relatively limited number of vendors dealing with enormous amounts of data.
The next level above that is application. Once upon a time, there were really three companies that controlled most of the software application revenue in this space: SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Great fortunes were made for these companies. They had these bundles of applications that were used to perform a whole bunch of different functions. The <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> would buy the Oracle suite and then use its database, CRM system, and accounting features in a single package. And it took forever to employ all of these applications, but you kind of got locked in to whatever bundle you bought.
What's happening now is that these bundles are getting unbundled to smaller parts. So you got Salesforce, which is doing CRM, Box for collaboration, NetSuite for financial reporting, and a million others.
So instead of a really small universe of companies that control the applications, now it's getting blown up to thousands and thousands of companies specializing in particular niche of all things.
Q: And what does that have to do with CloudFlare?
MP: On top of all of this, which I call the 'edge,' a whole bunch of [specialized computer] boxes used to exist. So think about what Cisco or Juniper makes, that has a firewall in it. There's a whole bunch of companies that are making those boxes that sit on the top 'edge.' That's what we're building - but in the cloud.
We're taking all of this functionality, and a big part of it is firewall and security, but it's also performance and load balancing and switching and routing, doing all of that. You can take CloudFlare's service and stick it in front of Salesforce or Workday or Box's servers. CloudFlare can sit in front of it and do all the functionalities that you used to have with the hardware companies. We've built data centers all around the world that sit between users of websites and the actual services, so instead of you having to actually buy a box for this, you could just deploy our service.
BI: Tell me more about the security part. How effective is CloudFlare against hackers? 
MP: About 1 out of every 20 web-requests pass through CloudFlare. So you probably have used our network hundreds of times in the last 24 hours, without even knowing it.
If you're an attacker, we're an incredibly frustrating thing because we help stop those attacks from ever hitting our clients' infrastructure. We actually see hackers who advertise services to launch DDoS attacks on behalf of others say they'll charge 20 to 30 times more or not even do it if it's against CloudFlare. 
BI: What attack or client do you remember the most?
MP: We work a lot with an organization called the Committee to Protect Journalists. This is an organization that protects journalists from being kidnapped or something, or helps those at risk when publishing controversial stories. 
So the director came in to our office with three African bloggers. One was from Ethiopia, the other was from Angola, but they wouldn't tell us the third one's name or where he came from because death squads were hunting him down in his home country. All three of them came up to me and hugged me, saying, "We couldn't be doing what we're doing without you, because the government's trying to silence us. They're trying to shut us down and launch attacks, hack our servers. CloudFlare stands in front of it and is able to make sure we stay online."
That's a pretty powerful thing. 
BI: What are some the trends you see in the cyber attack space?
MP: There's definitely an uptick in the number of attacks targeting the DNS infrastructure. DNS is what takes Amazon.com or Businessinsider.com and turns it into an IP address. If you can shut that down, then it can shut down the effective ability for anyone to get to a website. And I think we're very good at dealing with it.
There's also a lot of creativity on how hackers use other people's resources to help launch an attack. We're seeing old Internet protocols, like NTP, which stands for Network Time Protocol, exploited to launch these very high-scale attacks. The attacks we see have gotten over 400 gigs/second, and those are some of the biggest attacks that we've seen.
BI: In 2012, rumor was some VCs were offering to invest in <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/cloudflare-reveals-50m-round-from-union-square-ventures/">CloudFlare at a $1 billion+ valuation but you accepted a $50 million investment</a> at a lower valuation. What can you tell us about that? 
MP: We've actually never maximized our valuation. Our last valuation, if it wasn't the lowest valuation, it was close to it. But we really wanted to have Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures, because he's just a really deep thinker on the future of the Internet and how things work. Just maximizing valuation has never really been the primary driver for us than making sure we could find the right people. It's better to be long-term greedy than short-term greedy.
BI: What's next? An IPO?
MP: We're cash flow positive now. So we get to choose our own destiny and figure out what it is that we want to do next.
But if you want to see what our roadmap product line is, just kind of look at the entire Cisco catalogue. And say how could this become a service? And if we don't have it already, then that is probably something that we are working on. We still admire Cisco, and we think they are making great hardware. But we just want to become the service version of that. We think that's a really attractive business.

This $1 Billion Startup Handles 5% Of All Web Traffic And Is Ready To Take On Cisco

<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Global_Financial_Context_Paul_Singer.jpg">Wikimedia</a>Paul Singer</div></div>Elliott Management Corp., a $25 billion activist hedge fund founded by Paul Singer, has spent more than $1 billion to take a 2% ownership of data storage firm EMC, the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/activist-investor-pushes-emc-to-break-up-1405915262?ru=yahoo">Wall Street Journal reports.</a> 
That would make Elliott the fifth-largest shareholder of EMC, which is one of the largest in Elliott's 37-year history, according to the WSJ.
The move is largely seen as an attempt to demand that EMC split off its subsidiary VMware unit. Elliott thinks the separation could boost EMC's lagging stock price and potentially attract acquisition bids for EMC from other tech giants like Oracle, HP, and Cisco, the report said. 
EMC calls itself a "federation model," where different businesses run under one big umbrella: its core storage unit; its cloud software producer, Pivotal; its security arm, RSA Information; and VMware. This strategy has been <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/elliott-to-weigh-activist-options-for-emc-later-this-week/?_php=true&amp;_type=blogs&amp;_r=0">questioned by some investors</a> saying it causes friction internally and slowing efficiency. VMware is by far the biggest unit of EMC, with a market value of $41 billion, or a third of EMC's total market cap. EMC owns 80% of VMware.
EMC declined to comment on this story. Elliott and VMware were not immediately available for comment.
EMC's data storage business has struggled lately with the emergence of cloud storage technology. Its first quarter sales increased only 2% year-over-year, while its net income dropped almost 30%. The company will release its second quarter earnings on Wednesday.
The market, however, wasn't too surprised by today's news. RBC Capital Markets <a href="http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2014/07/21/emc-rising-possible-elliott-action-highlights-35-to-37-per-share-value-says-rbc/">wrote in a note today</a>, "Talk of spinning-off VMware is not new, and management has made it clear it's not in the best interest of EMC to do so." It said EMC acquiring the remaining 20% stake of VMware is the more likely scenario.
Elliott Management is the latest in a slew of activist investors making noise in the tech sector. ValueAct Capital played a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/08/26/ballmer-exit-another-sign-of-growing-influence-of-activist-investors/">big role in shaking up Microsoft's management</a> structure in 2013, while billionaire investor Carl Icahn continues to be a major force among companies like Apple and eBay. 
Elliott's most recent activist play occurred in January, when it demanded costs cuts and stock buy backs from the network infrastructure company, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-13/juniper-said-to-be-targeted-by-activist-fund-elliott-management.html">Juniper Networks.</a>

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