Cisco Systems Inc will
increase investment in its Shanghai research center, where it is working on
consumer-oriented products such as network DVD players and Internet-protocol TV
equipment, the company's chief development officer said yesterday in the city.
Within the next year, the US-based router giant will invest almost US$4
billion on research and development, mainly in its five research centers
worldwide, including the Shanghai operation.
Cisco plans to double staff to 500 at the local center by the middle of next
year,
In the future, Cisco's Shanghai center, founded in 2005 with an investment of
US$32 million, will hire more than 1,000 engineers, about 10 percent of the
company's global total for researchers, said Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief
development officer, without providing a specific timetable.
Cisco's local center is now working on new technologies, from voice over
Internet protocol to IPTV and network DVD devices that play computer-stored
videos on TV screens through wireless connections.
"We have strong technologies for Internet protocol," Giancarlo said in an
interview at the center.
Cisco will launch a new marketing campaign next month to target end users,
including changing its logo, Giancarlo said, declining to elaborate.
"The competition in the enterprise router market is heated, and Cisco, though
still No. 1, is losing market share to rivals in China," said Zhang Tao, an
analyst at Beijing-based CCID Consulting, a research firm under the Ministry of
Information Industry.
As such, Cisco is forced to find other business opportunities, such as the
promising consumer market, Zhang said.
"The key point (in assessing the consumer sector) is price, and Cisco has to
cut costs on management and talent," Zhang said.
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