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Article Excerpt
OPERATOR: Good afternoon. My name is Josh, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Cisco conference call to discuss the WAAS 4.1 release. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. (OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS). Thank you.
Mr. Jensen, you may begin your conference.
TROY JENSEN, ANALYST, PIPER JAFFRAY & CO.: Thanks, Josh. Thank you everyone for joining us on the call. My name is Troy Johnson, the Senior Research Analyst at Piper Jaffray, responsible for the Networking Equipment Space. With us on the call today is Marilyn Mora from the Investor Relations department of Cisco, and the man of the hour, George Kurian, VP of Wide Area Application Services.
I believe Marilyn would like to say a few words before we begin. George, if you could give a quick introduction following Marilyn's comments.
MARILYN MORA, MANAGER, IR, CISCO SYSTEMS: Thank you Troy. George and I are happy to be here. I would like to remind the audience that today's call will pertain strictly to Cisco's Application Delivery business.
No new financial information regarding Cisco's overall performance is intended or implied, and this call should not be viewed as an update of the quarter. We may make forward-looking statements regarding our business, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, outlined in detail in our documents filed with the SEC. Specifically, the most recent report on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, actual results may differ from statements made today.
With that, I will go ahead and turn it over to George. Thanks, George.
GEORGE KURIAN, VP, WIDE AREA APPLICATION NETWORK SERVICES, CISCO SYSTEMS: Thank you, Marilyn. Thank you, Troy. Thanks for your attention and participation this afternoon. I am George Kurian. I am the Vice President and General Manager of the Application Delivery business unit at Cisco, part of our Data Center's Switching and Services Technology group.
I report to John McCool, the Senior VP for our entire Data Center business, who in turn reports to our CEO, John Chambers. I am responsible for all aspects of our product and solution development, as well as for coordinating the Company's go to market and partner strategy for our segment. I look forward to our discussion this afternoon.
Troy, back to you.
TROY JENSEN: Thanks, George. I will tee it up here. Wondering if you could give us a quick update. I know you guys recently released the 4.1 software for the WAAS product. Curious to know what new features and improvements were included in this release?
GEORGE KURIAN: Thank you, Troy. WAAS 4.1, which we made available to customers commercially in August of this year, is a substantial expansion of the capabilities of our wide area optimization solution in three or four key areas, based on customer requirements and feedback.
The first are application specific accelerators that expand the performance, and improve the performance for specific applications. Some of those include expansions and support for existing file sharing protocol, such as Windows CIFS functionality, and then important new additions for Microsoft Exchange, the MAPI protocol, as well as for web and secure web applications, HTTP and HTTPS support. In addition, we support the capability to deliver video streams across the wide area network in an optimized fashion. The application specific optimizations that improve the performance and the delivery of those applications across the WAN.
The second is a series of enhancements to simplify the deployment of the WAAS solution set. Specifically, expansions in our automatic discovery capabilities, as well as improvements in the policy management environment, to make sure that you can reduce configurations to virtually nothing as part of the WAAS design and deployment, as well as improvements in our graphical user interface reporting and monitoring capabilities, so that customers, as they scale our deployment from hundreds of nodes to thousands of nodes, can do that in a very minimal operational overhead.
And then finally, the third area of technology progress is around virtual, the use of virtualization technology as part of our WAAS solution architecture. Specifically, to be able to consolidate services that customers want to continue to run in the branch office, such as Windows Application Servers, Windows infrastructures servers, security functions, and others, on to our WAAS devices, a capability called Virtual Blade. So to summarize, application specific accelerators, a series of rapid deployment and monitoring enhancements, as well as virtualization technology.
TROY JENSEN: Well, George, you mentioned MAPI and CIFS. Curious to know with the new release, how much improvements came versus the existing capabilities, and how you think you stack up against the competition?
GEORGE KURIAN: Our MAPI functionality roughly expands the performance of our product about four to five times, relative to the prior release of the WAAS functionality. We believe it compares as well as or favorably to any of the other vendors in the marketplace. Importantly, our approach to designing the MAPI solution was to collaborate with Microsoft. We were one of the original signatories of their MAPI protocol licensing agreement, and we have built the solution to work with the Microsoft MAPI specifications.
For CIFS, I think the performance enhancements are more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is our ongoing commitment to provide performance enhancements for all parts of our solution set.
TROY JENSEN: How about on SSL acceleration, I didn't hear you say that, but I thought the new product had some acceleration capabilities?
GEORGE KURIAN: Yes, the secure web solution is part of the 4.1 release. It is currently in extended beta trials. We have had it in customer environments for a while. We will be making it finally available as part of the first follow-on maintenance release for the 4.1 solution.
The SSL solution has unique enhancements, both in terms of performance, as well as in terms of the configurability of the solution. We have actually watched what customers have struggled with around SSL acceleration, and have architectured our solutions, so that you can maintain both the trusted model that SSL certificates need to have, but also deal with a set of simplified configurations, so that you don't...
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