14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt, Cisco is the prevalent figure when talking about professional networking. The company's connectivity solutions are to be found in extremely large networks with overwhelming traffic as well as in the largest organizations worldwide. Having successfully dominated the business sector, Cisco has shifted focus towards the consumer industry and plans to come with professional yet affordable products and services to meet the average user's needs - including home network virtualization.
Cisco's Scientific Atlanta division vice president, Luis Avila, stated that some of the products Cisco has designed for the home user will be showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Other consumer-oriented products will ship later next year and other will arise in a three year interval.
The networking expert is committed to giving the consumer access to video, photos, music, data voice and home video technologies, and this year, the company have presented their Direct to Disc technology. Among these products, Cisco have announced a new version of its set-top box, to operate on the MPEG-4 standard, a device that can already be rented from the cable and Internet Service providers.
But the most important step in Cisco's plans regarding the consumer market is the Wide Area Application Services technology for WAN acceleration and quality of service that can be used for mobile devices. This is the result of the company's efforts of improving the network inter-operation among home appliances.
Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco's data center, said that the company is taking into account the addition of virtualization features for consumer desktops within an interval of 36 months. Virtualization would allow users to make use of a thin client rather than a full PC in order to connect to the storage and even computing functions located at the provider's hosting facility.