We’ve had a couple of Cisco updates, as well as an interesting look into its history – which doesn’t seem to fit into the drastic fall its shares experienced in the past year or so. This 35 percent drop is the motive which drove the (still) no. 1 networking giant to announce its first cash dividend at 6 cents a share, which will be paid to investors in April 20^th. Evidently, a recent expansion to India and product launch wasn’t enough to put competitors HP, Juniper, InVox and many others out of the picture.

From Bloomberg:

“The indicated dividend yield is 1.4 percent, according to Bloomberg data. Cisco said in September it plans to start a dividend with a potential yield of 1 percent to 2 percent.”

Cisco has a $40 billion in cash stockpile and short-term investments, and as its sales growth lags behind the expected 12 percent to 17 percent, the company is trying to regain investors’ trust. This move did seem to have a positive effect, at least today, when shares rose 14 cents to $17.14 at 4 p.m. New York time. Cisco’s investors however, are not the only affected.

Cisco’s also hailing developments from its product security incident response team, saying it has delayed its planned March security advisories and notices update to September. This reportedly comes in light of the Japan quake, which means not all users of Cisco’s IOS networking software have equal or any access to its update.

“The networking company said it will continue to release vulnerability information as per its standard disclosure policy.”

Even whilst shareholders are losing confidence and completion, Cisco continues to be the top global networking company, which includes the VPN technology sector. NetworkWorld created a timeline of the company’s VPN offerings and their competition, which showed that Cisco undeniably lead the market for the past 10 years or so – from the VPN 3000 series to the ASA 5500 series security appliance and to the issues customers have encountered AnyConnect VPN Client last year.