Philipp Hausner, technical marketing manager for the Core and Foundation Technologies group at Cisco Europe, said the San Jose, California-based network vendor had previously offered VoIP capabilities down as far as the 2108 model in its Integrated Services Router, supporting up to 24 phone lines. He said this has now been extended to the 1860, which he described as fitting in the lower third of the ISR portfolio, enabling Cisco to target environments as small as eight-user offices.
Hausner said that if an office is a corporate branch, it can benefit from the survivability function Cisco already offers on its VoIP-enabled ISRs higher up the range. It’s a backup if the link to a central CallManager is lost, he said. The local ISR can temporarily take over and provide telephony functions. There is also the option to offer local break-out to the PSTN network rather than that function being provided by a CallManager IP PBX at headquarters.
The 1860 has a list price of $3,995. It’s a fully-flavored router with all the necessary routing functions, with slots that can take the new hardware-assisted IPS module, for instance, said Hausner.
The new switches are members of the Catalyst 2960 family. They ship with what Cisco is calling the LAN Lite version of its IOS operating system. Hausner described this as a simplified version of with basic functionality for voice and video, enabling the company to price the boxes more aggressively. The 24-port version starts at $995, US list.
Cisco said the range reduces the network total cost of ownership by simplifying the migration from non-intelligent hubs and unmanaged switches to fully scalable managed switches with entry-level security, quality of service, and availability.
This is likely to be a response to the growth of the smart switches that are offered as a web-managed alternative to unmanaged Layer-2 devices, at prices considerably lower than fully managed Layer-3 boxes. Companies in this space include Netgear, Allied Telesis, SMC, 3Com, and HP ProCurve.
Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at Eurolan Research, said: Cisco is introducing more and more products into the SMB market, coming from both the top down and bottom up.
Humphreys said Cisco is competing in this market with Panasonic, which he said has both the price points and channel in place. He said Cisco therefore needs to recruit the right channel to address this market with the new products.
