IronOrbit delivers the most secure, reliable, and high-performance hosted solutions partly thanks to its partnerships with IT software and hardware leaders. Our approach to hosting combines best-of-breed hardware and virtualization platforms (developed by our partners) with complete customizability and dedicated 24/7 technical support (provided by IronOrbit). The purpose of this Partner Focus blog series has been to familiarize our customers and readers with our partners, to recognize the role of our partners in our success, and to describe how we utilize their great products to build and deploy the best hosted solutions. Today’s post features the networking hardware and software leader Cisco.
Just this week, Cisco released its quarterly financial report. The company raised its revenue 4% to $11.7 billion and its profits to $1.9 billion, up 55% from last year. Though its orders from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa declined 6%, sales from the Americas and Asia rose 4% and 12% respectively. According to the financial reporter Brandon Bailey, the company’s strong performance bodes well for the high tech industry as a whole: “Cisco is often viewed as a bellwether for the commercial tech industry, since it’s the leading supplier of network routers and switches used by businesses, government agencies and telecommunications providers.”
Cisco was founded in 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a husband-and-wife team that worked on the computer operations staff at Stanford University. The company’s first innovative product was the multiple-protocol router. At the time, networks were less standardized and had compatibility issues. The multiple-protocol router made it possible or at least much easier for computers on formerly incompatible networks to communicate with one another. In addition to their innovativeness, Cisco’s early products were also noted for their longevity. The software of its routers were capable of being updated to support the latest advancements and tweaks of hardware and networking technology. This flexibility allowed Cisco to thrive in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when mainstream computing and network technologies were evolving quickly and haphazardly.
Cisco firmly established itself as the leading developer and manufacturer of networking hardware and software in the 1990s. Its products put it at the center of the dot-com boom. In 2000, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $500 billion. A decade later, the company still dominates the competition in terms of market share. Its products hold the lead in the categories of switches (69% market share), routers (53%), wireless LAN (53%), VoIP (37%), network security (31%), and home networking (23%). The average person will probably be most familiar with its Linksys modems and routers.
IronOrbit’s data centers utilize Cisco’s industry-best networking hardware and software. Their products are a key ingredient of our patented Atomic Speed Technology. IronOrbit’s talented engineers calibrate Cisco’s hardware to optimize the speed, security, and reliability of our hosted solutions. Like with any true partnership, Cisco and IronOrbit contribute equally to success of our products. Cisco provides unparalleled raw materials in the form of routers, switches, and other networking devices to IronOrbit—and millions of other hosting companies, IT departments, and data center owners. The difference with IronOrbit is that we enhance our Cisco hardware with advanced calibration and 24/7 infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. We also uniquely combine Cisco’s products with other industry-leading technologies (VMware hypervisors, Citrix VDIs) and customize our hosted solutions according the exact IT requirements and preferences of our clients. With IronOrbit, no two clouds are the same—except that all our hosted solutions combine best-of-breed hardware and software with in-depth customization and dedicated support.