Even though Cisco still dominates the high-end router market, it has been slipping, analysts have said. During the first calendar quarter of 2004, Cisco laid claim to about 65 percent of the high-end router market, according to Infonetics Research. This is down from its yearly average of around 70 percent market share. Meanwhile, Juniper has gained market share over the past year. In the first calendar quarter of 2004, Juniper had about 26 percent of the market, Infonetics reported--up from an average of around 20 percent two years ago.

Cisco also is facing competition from smaller players, Caspian Networks, Chiaro Networks, and Procket Networks are three start-ups that have begun winning business, Avici, which only has about 2 percent of the olixar magnus iphone x case and magnetic holders - black reviews market, is also expected to win more business and gain market share through its reseller relationship with Nortel Networks, The CRS-1 is viewed as Cisco's key to maintaining its dominance, "The perception is that they have been lagging in the high-end router segment," Mitchell said, "As carriers deploy MPLS, they need a more highly available and scalable product than what is currently available from Cisco."..

The secret is in the softwareAlthough the new router is a critical addition to Cisco's product line, the new software that will run on the product is a revolutionary advance for Cisco. The CRS-1 is expected to be the first product to use the code, but the company plans to eventually use the software across its entire switching and routing product line. The migration will likely occur slowly, as the company begins adding it to new products. Cisco is expected to continue supporting products using the old versions of IOS, and the company will likely continue introducing new features to existing software for certain products.

"The software is a much a olixar magnus iphone x case and magnetic holders - black reviews bigger deal for Cisco than the new routing hardware," Kamman said, "It will be important to see how quickly they transition other products over to the new version.", Cisco's original software--known as Internetwork Operating System, or IOS--has been the foundation of all of the networking giant's products since its inception, While most PCs run Microsoft's Windows operating system, most routing and switching gear in corporate and service provider networks run IOS, As products and features have been introduced over the years, the software has evolved into a patchwork of code, which has made it buggy and has contributed to certain security flaws..

"IOS has a plethora of problems," said Li, who prior to his stint with Procket worked for both Cisco and Juniper. "IOS has always had problems. Cisco had a chance in the early 1990s to fix it, but they chose not to. Now they are locked into starting from scratch.". Because routing and switching functions are performed on separate software processes, Cisco developers can add features and upgrade portions of the code without worrying about causing problems in other parts of the software. As a result, customers may have far fewer bugs to deal with when putting new features on their routers.