Cisco Rolling Out Big New Box

After some false starts, a few rejections and the inevitable delays, Cisco (CSCO) will wheel out its much anticipated megarouter Tuesday at a half-day celebration in San Jose, Calif.

Seismologists and industry watchers alike will probably take note of Cisco's belated introduction of telecom's largest Internet traffic sorter, known in most circles as the HFR, or huge fast router. Cisco is expected to name the new device Cisco Routing System 1, or CRS1, an answer to rival Juniper's (JNPR) big T640 "Gibson," which has been on the market for two years.

Perhaps bigger still, Cisco's HFR operates on a new software system -- tentatively dubbed IOX -- that the company hopes to extend across its corner of the industry, say analysts.

Cisco rode to success in the 1990s on the advent and widespread adoption of routers, devices that link and manage traffic over computer networks. But the data networking king has seen its dominance of the core router market dwindle in the past year as Juniper won more of the business.

In fact, in the first quarter of this year, Cisco's share of the big router market fell to around 66%. Juniper nudged its way up nearly 3 percentage points to 34%, according to a Dell'Oro Group tally.

While Cisco is treating the intro of CRS1 as a big event, complete with presentations from CEO John Chambers and router chief Mike Volpi, industry observers say there's still a lot of work ahead and potentially little payoff for all the effort.

At least one big customer tried Cisco's big router and returned it. People familiar with the HFR trials say that in addition to requiring twice the power of standard gear and enormous cooling systems to keep it from overheating, it runs on an entirely new software platform.

Power and cooling issues are considered troubling but nonetheless manageable. Incompatible software, on the other hand, requires a great deal of technical labor and upgrades, especially since most Net gear runs on Cisco's Internetworking Operating System, or IOS, say analysts.