Stephen Liu, the head of marketing for Cisco’s service provider business, believes that his company’s Carrier Routing System (CRS) lineup will hit the $10 billion revenue mark within the next two years. That’s quite the outlook when you consider that the vendor reported total sales of $12 billion last quarter.

The CRS product family has generated $8 billion in revenue since Cisco introduced the first model in 2004. CRS-X, the third product in the series, was announced last Wednesday.

Why does Liu think that CRS-X will prove to be a hit among carriers? For starters, Verizon and SoftBank Corp, one of the largest caregivers in Japan, have already ordered the system. There’s also the fact that the new model can handle four times as much traffic as its predecessor, the CRS-3, and ten times more data than the original CRS.
Liu’s comments follow an update from Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer. The executive revealed that his company expanded its partnership with NetApp in a move to enhance FlexPod, the firms’ jointly-developed converged infrastructure solution. The initiative has three primary objectives: making FlexPod more open, developing a massively scalable version of the appliance, and creating a model for remote branch offices and SMB environments. Cisco and NetApp will also launch an application validation program designed to make the platform more attractive for ISVs.

FlexPod has not generated $8 billion in revenue yet, but it appears to be on the right track. According to Warrior, the two-year old platform is already distributed by over 700 resellers and used by over 2,100 enterprise customers worldwide.