Nick Lippis interviews Bobby Johnson, President and CEO of Foundry Networks. In this podcast Bobby discusses the key areas where Foundry is investing to address the enterprise and service provider ethernet markets. There's a great discussion on industry structure and the new business cycle in which the network industry is entering that will be marked by innovation sparking a feature race and further consolation.

Nick Lippis interviews Naresh Kannan, Director Product Management and David Peikin, Director Marketing at Visual Networks now Fluke Networks. Visual Networks' flagship solution Visual UpTime Select is being upgraded to 2.0 with a focus on VoIP performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Select 2.0 will be released on Feb 24, 2006. I give my take on the announcement at the end of the podcast. If your interested in network performance monitoring you may want to check out the Network Physics podcast as well as these companies compete.

Scott Bradner, University Technology Security Officer, Harvard University and John Gallant, President and Editorial Director of Network World join me in our first industry roundtable. We discuss the reality of Web Services/SOA and how the IP Telephony vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel) are using it. The discussion of VoiceCon drove us to E-911 open issues with Scott providing an IETF update on what the group is doing to help solve this important industry issue. VoiceCon also brought SIP to light as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, et al are embracing it and now pushing Cisco into SIP acceptance with Call Manager 5.0. ShoreTel made it to the discussion, thanks to its strong showing at VoiceCon. Juniper was next and we talked about its enterprise strategy and weighed in on its pros and cons. This led to a general discussion on Xorp or eXtensible Open Router Platform, Vyatta and its potential impact on Cisco and Juniper. John gives a sneak preview on next week�s Network World where they�ll cover the hot topic of IT pandemic planning, thanks to concerns over the avian flue, and the planned acquisition of BellSouth by at&t.

I interview John McHugh, GM and Vice President, ProCurve networking by HP. The ProCurve Group is the 2nd largest network switch concern, bigger then Extreme and Foundry combined and perhaps bigger then 3Com and closing in on Nortel in terms of the overall enterprise network infrastructure market. John talks about ProCurve's successes, challenges and where he is leading this group. It's about 25 minutes. Enjoy.

F5 Networks Jason Needham, Director of Product Management and Satya Vardharajan, product Manager came to brief me on their new BIG-IP appliances, the Global Traffic Manager (GTM), the Link Controller and the 8400 Platform. We also discussed F5's Traffic Management Operating System or TM/OS which is the firm's product development platform for hardware and software development. I find two things different about F5. One is that their customers are both networking and datacenter executives which is unique to a company the size of F5. Second is their TM/OS architecture has allowed F5 to stack software features/services on top of their appliances pretty rapidly such as adding DNS support, distributed application management, intelligent session persistence et al on top of its industry hardened load balancing technology.