Anticipating explosive growth in video communications, Cisco is readying product improvements designed to simplify the management of videoconferencing traffic and to streamline its use for employees.

The products, announced Tuesday, include new software for adjusting network resources based on video requirements, and a new cloud-based virtual meeting room service for its video-as-a-service hosting partners.

Jonathan Rosenberg has left Skype as chief technology strategist and returned to Cisco to help the company better compete against video and collaboration start-ups and consumer-oriented businesses that threaten its opportunities in those markets. Rosenberg, a pioneer is the development of the SIP protocol, left Cisco in 2009 as a Cisco Fellow in the Voice Technology Group.

Rosenberg returned to Cisco in mid-February as vice president and CTO of cloud collaboration.

Cisco Tuesday introduced small cell hardware and intelligent software designed to help carriers and enterprises improve wireless connections over hybrid networks made of 3G and 4G cellular and Wi-Fi technologies.

The products, which Cisco plans to demonstrate at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, are intended to help networks grapple with a projected 13-fold increase in the size of the mobile Internet by 2017, Cisco officials said.

Cisco Systems plans to sell its Linksys home networking business to Belkin International for an undisclosed sum under an agreement that includes cooperation between the companies on software, service-provider products and other areas.

Belkin will keep the Linksys brand alive and honor warranties for customers who bought Linksys products, it said in a press release Thursday.

Looking to "cloudify" its software-focused products and simplify IT operations, the tech giant acquires the Wi-Fi and cloud-networking start-up.

The three colleagues who created the cloud-networking and Wi-Fi startup Meraki at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science six years ago were not expecting to be acquired by Cisco Systems. But the tech giant announced today its intent to buy the startup saying it plans to throw down $1.2 billion in cash, along with retention-based incentives.

Cisco has named a former Symantec executive to head its struggling collaboration group, which saw three different leaders in less than a year.

Cisco on Tuesday announced that it is increasing the number of collaboration software products that its hosting partners can offer via the cloud, hoping to make the bundles more attractive to the partners and their customers.

At an announcement at its Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles, Cisco also said that it will provide its cloud-based WebEx web conferencing product for the first time as packaged software that customers can deploy on-premise or in a private cloud.

Further showing its commitment to the OpenStack project, Cisco has rolled out a free distribution of the open source cloud management platform, which it will package other services on top of, including virtual networking and high-availability features.

NetApp and Cisco this week revealed ExpressPod, a new converged infrastructure for small and medium-sized organizations based on its predecessor, FlexPod. ExpressPod fills out a mid-sized offering the partnership had been lacking.

Additionally, Cisco and NetApp will announce new storage clustering capabilities to FlexPod and the release of a validated VMware solution for the Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) on FlexPod.

Cisco Systems is modifying the licensing options for its Unified Communications Manager's UC Release 9.0 in an attempt to simplify the process and make the use of a variety of client devices easier, the company said on Thursday.