Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), of San Jose, CA, is a dominant force in the market of developing and commercializing computer networking solutions for many types of organizations. The month of December marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of this company first founded in San Francisco, from which Cisco derives its name. Cisco offers plenty of evidence that intellectual property protection is not mutually exclusive with open source ideals, such as its recent decision to expand the resources freely available through its OpenSOC (Security Operation Center) project, which utilizes Big Data techniques to enhance security analytics. Cisco has faced plenty of competition over the past few months from Microsoft in the area of enterprise collaboration infrastructure, although third quarter data available from both companies showed that Cisco has lately widened its lead in this market.
We often feature Cisco here on the Companies We Follow series and our latest search of patent applications filed by this company showed us a great amount of research into video communications. One patent application we feature discusses a method for automatically recognizing videoconferencing callers. Improved collaboration systems, including those which can alert online collaborators to an emergency situation being experienced by a person on the other end of a communication link, are discussed in a couple of other applications. We also discuss one filing for a technology that provides local content of interest in response to global searches for information.
