Burton is the CTO of Cisco's unified communications group. But he's not very good at that person-to-person communication thing.

According to a profile he created on PeopleJar, Burton characterizes himself as an amateur cyclist. Apparently enraged that his custom-built $4,000 Cervélo was a day late, Burton stormed into Cyclepath, a bike shop in Pleasanton, Calif., to get a final fitting. When told he'd have to wait 15 minutes while other customers got served, Burton started letting loose on the salesman, according to Cyclepath owner Joel Davis.

After a salesman apologized for the delay and asked if there was anything he could do, the Cisco executive let loose with an acidic reply. "Be sorry you are that way, not that I feel that way," Burton said, according to a written report of his encounter. "I hope you die." After Davis called Burton to complain, Burton told him, "Under no uncertain terms will I ever fucking apologize to any member of your fucking staff." Davis says Burton finally relented after he told him that Cyclepath customers were willing to testify about his behavior to the police, and offered the Cyclepath employee an apology that Davis characterized as "half-hearted."

We'd like to know: Are Cisco's labs developing a solution to prevent the likes of Burton from communicating with anyone, anytime, ever?

(Photo by Text 100)

I'm a Cisco employee, and at the company meeting going on right now, Frank Calderoni, CFO, just announced that as part of our expense reduction plans, they're going to get rid of the free drinks in breakrooms, replacing them with vending machines. He said it'll save like $12-13 million. A few slides later, the head of HR was bragging about Cisco being ranked the 6th best place to work by Fortune. I don't think they realized the logical disconnect.

Add this to Cisco's recently announced pay-to-play gym, and you wonder if Calderoni, Cisco's bean-counter-in-chief, isn't trying to turn employees into a profit center. Another in our series of corporate America's stupid cost-cutting tricks! Has your employer pinched pennies for no purpose? Send us your tales of perks and jerks.

Spotted at Collateral Auction Systems, an outfit in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont, Calif. which sells repossessed cars: A Mercedes biturbo V12 SL600, a car which sells new for $120,000.

On the license-plate frame: the logo of Cisco, a San Jose-based networking-equipment giant which makes everything from cable set-top boxes to telecom switches to home Wi-Fi routers.

There's a story behind this photo of someone who lived high off of Cisco's rich stock options — an engineer? an executive? a salesman? And just as suddenly, the spigot of cash shut off. In six months, the stock has fallen by more than 40 percent. Cisco stealthily laid off employees even as its cheerleading CEO John Chambers said the company wouldn't cut staff. We don't have the details on how this six-figure driving machines landed in a repo lot — but the picture tells a story all the same.

CDO-Wide Expense Management Policies

1. Year-End PTO: As announced on CEC, Cisco U.S./Canada offices will shut down from December 29 - January 2 as part of the company’s expense management initiative.
· This mandate applies to the vast majority of CDO employees. Management will notify specific CDO teams that have customer-related exceptions during the year-end shutdown period including support for Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and Customer Assurance Program (CAP) teams.
· We also strongly encourage all employees to take additional time off from December 22nd through December 24th or by the end of Q2. Taking additional PTO beyond the four mandated days can significantly contribute to your business unit cost savings and provides a well-deserved break for you.

2. Holiday Activities: All CDO teams are encouraged to celebrate the holidays, but try to find creative ways that result in no cost to the company. There should be no Business Group, Technology Group or Business Unit-funded holiday parties.

3. Hiring: A number of new Cisco-wide hiring policies were announced this week. These policies are intended to ensure that movement of talent continues to take place in strategic areas to the company.
* On Monday, November 17th all open requisitions were cancelled; CDO requisitions can be reopened with Development Council member approval. [REDACTED NAME OF AN EMPLOYEE HERE]
* Replacement or backfill positions will be approved at the discretion of the Development Council Business Group lead based on revised budget affordability.
* College recruiting programs in the US, India and China are not subject to the above requirements. They will continue to maintain CDO's strategic relationships with designated universities and to provide access to candidates.

4. Travel: Travel is an area where CDO spends a significant amount each year and where all employees can make a significant impact. You should expect reductions in the following areas based on revised budget affordability:
* Support for tradeshows in accordance with revised Marketing requirements
* Travel required for participation in standards forums

5. Project-Related Costs: Outside services, equipment expense, capital purchases and prototypes are another large area of expense management focus in CDO. Specific spend allocation on each of these areas will be managed by the Business Group to fit within revised budgets.

6. Training: As a Development Council, we remain committed to the development of our employees, even during challenging economic times. To do so, in adherence with Cisco policy, we are requiring that all training take place locally. We also ask that all CDO-employees look for ways to maximize training budgets in the following ways:
* Revisit and reprioritize development plans with your manager before you sign up for training with an associated cost. This will save on potential cancellation fees later. Refer to the CDO website for more training guidelines and ways you can continue your development and save money.

For Cisco, even the cancellation is a sales opportunity; the company is pitching it as an example of the money-saving potential of its videoconferencing and teleworking products. Boring! Throwing money at salespeople is the best way to make them feel loved — just another sign that Cisco has no real understanding of what a human network really means. It also suggests CEO John Chambers's influence is waning at the company — since this is the kind of event at which his evangelical delivery shines.

The integrated LifeConnections center provides our employees with a holistic model for health care delivery with a full range of options. Studies show that by bringing together health care, fitness, and child care in one location, this results in greater employee life balance through less time away from work and reduced need to drive to other service locations, as well as a positive return on investment for Cisco."

The current fitness centers located in Buildings SJ-6 and SJ-L will end operations on October 31.

For information about the current fitness centers in SJ-L and SJ-6, please see http://wwwin.cisco.com/wpr/fitness/sj/

The new Life Connections Fitness Center, Building SJ-Q at 3571 North First Street, will open on November 4 at 4:30pm.

LifeConnections Fitness Center hours will be the same as our current fitness centers; Mon-Thu - (5:30am-9pm), Fri - (5:30am-8pm).

Members are encouraged to sneak a peak of the new facility and beat the rush on pre-registering - Monday, October 27 - Wednesday, October 29 from 10am-4pm.

Membership dues for the new Fitness Center will be $20 per month for employees, $30 per month for contractors or $2 per day for badged guests. more...

Cisco is subsidizing 90% of the cost for these improvements, sharing only 10% with employees.

Regular Cisco Employees can receive the first three months of membership for free by taking the Health Connections Personal Health Assessment by November 30.

You are invited to a grand opening event November 3

All are encouraged to attend the grand opening event on Monday, November 3 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Building SJ-Q.

We know how this ends — with tech-company shareholders footing the bill. Cisco wrote off $900 million in bad debt in 2001. It will surely claim to have learned its lessons since then. But as others rush in to help customers acquire their wares, some will surely get burnt. As will investors, who may think they're buying shares in a tech company, only to discover they've put money into a bank.

Arista — known as Arastra until it changed its name this week — is expected to announce on Thursday that it has recruited Jayshree Ullal as chief executive. Ms. Ullal left Cisco in May after leading the company’s $10 billion corporate switch business. In addition, the company will name a Stanford University professor, David R. Cheriton, as its chief scientist. Mr. Bechtolsheim and Mr. Cheriton are the sole investors in Arista, and they are known in Silicon Valley as men with a golden touch.

They decided to focus on switches that shuttle Internet traffic using the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard, which is many times faster than the Gigabit Ethernet standard that dominates data centers today.

Switches are the most common hardware used to funnel information between computing systems in a network. The key to Arista’s switches is the structure of the software that manages them.

A typical switch from Cisco is rich in features, but has up to 20 million lines of software code and may run on relatively slow processors. Arista breaks all of the major and minor tasks into their own modules that can be updated individually and uses more powerful chips to run it all.

Mr. Bechtolsheim said the design would let Arista make quick changes to products — even while they were running — and would also open an interface for customers to more easily add their own features.

“My iPhone runs better software than a typical switch,” Mr. Bechtolsheim said. "It is just mind-boggling that the cheapest consumer product has more robust software than what the Internet runs on."

(Photo by Brian Stubel)

One company which listened, to its detriment, to shareholders was Microsoft. When Bill Gates ran the software company, he liked to keep a year's worth of expenses on hand, in case things went awry. Microsoft is no longer quite so stingy with its cash; it dribbles some out in dividends, and gave shareholders a $32 billion payout a few years back. Good thing it didn't shell out $44 billion for Yahoo; that deal would have left it cash-poor and debt-ridden, at exactly the wrong time. Even so, Microsoft's balance sheet is no longer the most sterling in tech.

So who's got cash on hand? Here are the 10 richest tech companies, from a Yahoo Finance screening. (I left out companies, like IBM, whose cash was matched by equally outsized debts.)

1. China Mobile, $31.0 billion
   China's oil, steel, and finance giants are investing overseas. Why not its leading wireless company? Yes, China censors its citizens. That was a trendy thing to worry about in August 2008.
2. Cisco Systems, $26.2 billion
   Cisco's so proud of its cash pile, its investor-relations chief has blogged about it. If only investors had any confidence in Cisco's bizarre social-network acquisition strategy, which has nothing to do with its fine telecom-equipment assets. Memo to Cisco's M&A team: Just because it has the word "network" in it doesn't mean you have to buy it.
3. Microsoft, $21.2 billion
   The $44 billion Yahoo offer was half in cash, half in stock, which would have strained Microsoft's finances and required it to take on some debt. Good thing it fell through.
4. Apple, $20.7 billion
   In the '90s, Apple almost ran out of money. No danger of that happening soon. Ever-secretive Apple rarely makes big, splashy acquisitions; that could change if the right bargain comes along.
5. Google, $12.7 billion
   A slumping share price may mean more acquisitions done for cash.
6. Intel, $12.0 billion
   Intel's chip factories require billions of dollars in investment; count on Intel to spend its money there, rather than on cute Web companies.
7. Nokia, $10.8 billion
   Like Cisco, Nokia's eager to be more of a Web player. Blogging and lifecasting are particular areas of interest. The cell-phone maker could throw investors a curveball and buy, say, Six Apart, Automattic, or Tumblr.
8. Dell, $9.0 billion
   Dell could have more cash on its hands if it manages to sell its PC factories, a move it's considering as HP chips away at its business. On the shopping list: software and services.
9. Motorola, $7.2 billion
   It's hard to see Motorola being an active acquirer until it figures out what to do with its cell-phone business.
10. Taiwan Semiconductor, $7.0 billion
    AMD's only worth $2.6 billion, and TSMC already makes some chips for it. Why not just buy it?

Jabber isn't just another AIM wannabe. It uses XML trickery to connect to every popular instant message service — AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo — and to let programmers connect it to other services, be they for man or machine. It's already widely adopted by the IT workers whose managers sign the purchase orders for Cisco networking hardware.

By building Jabber support into its switchers and routers, Cisco can make it easy for admins to get alerts from their hardware in the same IM window as their buddies. Cisco can also sell companywide IM setups that are closely tied to Cisco network gear for security and monitoring.

Cisco recently picked up PostPath, which makes Linux-based email, calendar and collaboration software. I'm sure someone at Cisco plans to bundle Jabber's instant messaging with PostPath's Outlook-like features and dub it a "platform" to compete with Microsoft.

But Jabber's main competition isn't Redmond, it's Dulles. Cisco can now offer managers a way to ban AIM from the workplace, or at least to manage it locally with Cisco equipment rather than routing employees' conversations straight to AOL.

The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

Did you catch it? Asha claims that her network — presumably run by the Linksys router — is called "Geeking Out." But the shot of her Apple laptop shows that she's connected to a computer-to-computer network — most likely a wireless link to Asha's iMac, which can easily be configured to broadcast its Internet connnection via Wi-Fi.

Much easier than configuring a Linksys router, and a great ad for Apple technology — so easy, even a trust-funder can use it! As a promotion for Cisco, Asha's video utterly fails. We won't even get into her claim to have "wireless speakers," when the wire housings on the wall are obviously visible.

Remind us, what's the point of a celebrity endorsement? Ah yes — to have some of the endorser's qualities rub off on the product. If Cisco wants to be known for a glossy surface hiding technical ineptitude, it's found its star in Asha.

There will be no security through the Townsend Center Public Parking delivery access driveway! Walk right in and get on gurp [sic] with the blue button up collared shirt, khaki Dockers crowd balding mid life guys with glasses.

After the jump, our tipster's full guide with illustrations.

From the Townsend side of the block the Concourse Exhibition Center, walk through the Townsend Center Public Parking lot's delivery ramp straight through to the parking lot on the other side of the Parking building.

That parking lot is the auxiliary parking lot of the Concourse Exhibition Center is where the Cisco Dev Conference Party overflows with the 'Sports' and 'Games' section of their themed party reside.

There will only be security on the 7th and 8th street sides of the party, as well at the Concourse Exhibition Center door.

Of course, in publishing this we could ruin it for everybody. But if there's a lesson to be learned here for future reference, it's that walking through a connected parking garage is often a fine way to find a back door. Dress the part and complain you lost your badge in case anyone asks.