OStatic

While Cisco prepares to reveal the winners in its Developer Contest next week, I got the chance to speak with Team Enhancers about its contest entry.

The Local Advertising Mesh Network, an advertising platform for local ad management, is Rajesh Kotagiri's response to the challenge Cisco put forth in the Developer Contest guidelines -- to use the network as a platform approach and develop an application using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a service module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

In June, Cisco announced the ten finalists in its Think Inside the Box developer competition. The global contest centered on the network as a platform philosophy, and asked applicants to develop applications using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

The contest drew nearly 900 hopeful development teams from 75 countries. After many long hours of deliberation, the 110 qualifying teams were whittled down to 10 finalists.

OStatic has been fortunate enough to talk to a few of these finalist teams -- including Toshiyuki Sakata, from Team CampUser. CampUser, based in Brazil, developed its Locker for IP Telephony application to help network administrators maximize their organization's operational efficiency and billing policy administration through call authorization profiles and call management processing.

Cisco declares war, embraces open source. It has a new Unified Computing initiative, and although the technology is proprietary, open source software plays a role.

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Can open source technology bring cost savings and performance advantages even down at the core network infrastructure levels where players such as Cisco dwell?

Vyatta, which offers both software and hardware aimed at the space, is pushing forward with the concept that it can. On the heels of its recent announcement of an open source router aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses--where Vyatta's router costs thousands less than comparable offerings from Cisco--the company has a new version 4 release of its Vyatta Community Edition network operating system. Previous editions have been downloaded 150,000 times by organizations in aerospace and defense, education, financial services, and government.

Do businesses necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars on network routers from giants such as Cisco? Vyatta, with the company tagline welcome to the dawn of open source networking, is challenging the idea with an open source network appliance for the small- and medium-sized (SMB) business market. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is a small appliance that uses the company's Linux-based applications. Pricing starts at $697, with products from Cisco and others costing thousands more, but the jury's out on whether businesses will trust the core of their hardware/software network infrastructure to open source.