Cisco made its boldest set of announcements for years last week, in an ambitious bid to reverse the decline in its service provider business (down 13% year-on-year in the most recent quarter) and reassert control over the way the Internet platform will evolve in the next generation. The company’s technology was foundational to the early commercial Internet but in recent years, it has struggled to adapt to a world of open cloud architectures and virtualization, and other technologies which break down the dominance of its closed, vertically integrated platforms in enterprise and operator networks. In an event in San Francisco, dubbed ‘Internet for the Future’, the company launched new silicon, software and optics for service providers. At the core of…