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Cisco's Security business had a good year in 2010. Not a great year, but a good one. Cisco has always struggled to be thought of as a best of breed security player and 2010 was no different. But what is different about 2010 is Cisco made some of the biggest mindshare gains among skeptics than it has in a very long time. Lets take a look back at Cisco Security in 2010.

Cisco received numerous positive reviews from the Gartner Group in 2010. Gartner placed several of Cisco's security products in its Leaders magic quadrant. Cisco is considered by Gartner to be a leader in the following security spaces: SSLVPN, Email Security, Secure Web gateway and Network Access Control.

Cisco released its new flagship FW/IPS solution in 2010 to compete in Datacenter security deals. The ASA 5585X can scale up to almost 40Gbps of FW performance in a 2RU form factor.

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In addition to Cisco Systems having a strong foothold in network routers and switches market for enterprises, the company also has a large presence in home networking products, which includes networking and communication devices and software for household users. The company sells these products under the Linksys brand.

Cisco competes with well-established players like D-Link (TPE:2332) and Netgear in the home networking market. We expect slower growth going forward and for the market share to stabilize at around 26% over the next few years.

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Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system.

The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday.

However, users able to get online can still expect that some features may not work as reliably as expected. For example, peoples' online status may be slow to update, and instant messages might not be delivered as quickly as they are normally, the blog post said.

Skype's initial description of the problem said many of the "supernodes" that act as directories for Skype users to find one another were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of the Skype client.

"Our engineers are creating new 'mega-supernodes' as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal," the company blog post said.

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The U.S. military is ratcheting up the pressure on its network suppliers to deploy IPv6 on their own networks and Web sites so they can gain operational experience and fix bugs in the products they are selling that support the next-generation Internet protocol.

Now, with depletion of IP addresses using the current standard known as IPv4 expected to occur next year, the Pentagon is taking a tougher stance with network suppliers that are marketing -- but not using -- IPv6.

Pressure from the U.S. military is one of the reasons network vendors such as Brocade and Cisco are beginning to support IPv6 on their Web sites. The military considers this an important step in demonstrating commitment to the new standard.

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HP launched a trade-in program aimed at Cisco customers with an aging infrastructure. HP Networking's "A Catalyst for Change" Cisco trade-in promotion entices candidates to migrate to an HP infrastructure with an upfront 20% discount off the list price of its switches.

HP estimates that nearly $9 billion in Cisco networking equipment is approaching end of life or service.

To qualify for the 20% discount on HP A-Series and E-Series switches, Cisco customers must trade-in eligible Cisco Catalyst 2960/S, 3560/E or X, 3750/E or X, 4500 E, 4900 or 6500 series switches, as well as Nexus 5000 or 7000 series switches. To smooth the transition, HP claims "proven" interoperability with Cisco gear, as well as planning and migration services, and fast-track certification training.

The full article can be read here.

Skype's struggles to keep its VoIP service up and running, the company had assured the public via its Twitter account, "Skype now returning to normal."

The LA Times reports that millions of Skype phone users worldwide couldn't make calls or were dropped in mid-conversation, because of a network connection failure that began about 9 a.m. Wednesday PST. 'For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of,' says Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. 'Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide.' In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology shouldn't see an outage but that is not really the case - the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. 'The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business,' writes Om Malik. 'If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage.