To ease the network administration burden for its branch offices, State Street Corp. in Boston has deployed 10 Cisco Systems Inc. integrated services routers (ISR) and said this week that it plans to add up to 140 more of the devices in coming years.
Cisco"s integrated routers combine security, routing, network management and voice-over-IP capability in one box, "which takes up less space and less administration," said Gordon Bither, senior vice president of integrated network solutions at the institutional investment services company.
State Street plans to add between 120 and 140 such routers over the next four to five years to those it deployed in the past year, he said. While Bither would not discuss State Street"s costs, Cisco lists the ISR 3845 models used by the company at about US$15,000 apiece. At that price, State Street could eventually invest more than $2 million in the router deployment.
According to Bither, State Street can avoid installing an expensive private branch exchange voice switch in each branch by using the Cisco router to send voice switching and voice mail capability through the network and back to its Boston center. "That saves us many times the cost of the ISR," he said.
The company compared Cisco"s router to products from Avaya Inc. about a year ago as State Street sought to launch an IP telephony effort. "Both companies have similar functions available, but we found with Cisco more complete account management and service support," Bither said.
State Street is gradually migrating to VOIP, with 4,000 VOIP phones already in place and another 16,000 due to come on line by mid-2007, he said. Bither declined to say how much the system will cost.
The router deployment is part of State Street"s migration of its global, self-managed frame-relay office network to a dual-carrier, fully managed Multi-Protocol Label Switching network design, which was announced Aug. 1, Bither said. AT&T Corp. and MCI Inc. are the two carriers managing the framework, which includes eight data centers.
State Street"s use of the router is representative of what many enterprises are doing to reduce complexity with branch offices, analysts said. Cisco this week announced that it has sold half a million of the integrated routers, with the 500,000th going to auto parts retailer The Pep Boys in Philadelphia. Pep Boys is equipping each of its 593 retail outlets with a Cisco 2811 ISR, the midtier model.
Pep Boys officials would not comment on the deployment.
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston, said the router"s success stems from the potential costs it can save companies. "It"s easier to manage one box than five," he said.
The closest competitor to the integrated router is from NetDevices Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., Kerravala said, although he noted that Juniper Networks Inc. is developing similar capabilities with its purchase of Peribit. Other networking companies did not respond to requests for information on how their product lines compare to the Cisco device, although an Avaya spokeswoman said that company"s three Media Gateway models offer similar functions.
Cisco"s integrated router family consists of 27 devices, including wireless versions, ranging in price from $400 to $15,000 each. The ISR 3845 being used by State Street ranges in price from $7,000 to $15,000, depending on which features are turned on, said Ian Pennell, senior vice president of the Cisco Access Business Unit.
The router"s strength stems from its ability to integrate functions, Bither said, and Cisco is already developing another function to integrate: wide-area network application acceleration. With that in mind, Cisco has a controlled release of the routers running its new Application Oriented Networking software announced in June.