Why We’ll Colonize Mars Before Cisco Understands Software

Over thirty years ago – ouch — I joined Cisco as its very first marketing hire, tasked with giving them a more professional image than “Stanford grad students run amok” in preparation for their IPO. But during my six-year posting, I also got to witness Cisco’s first attempt to build an actual…

The New Enterprise Requirement: Full Lifecycle Network Automation

Enterprise campus and access networks are growing increasingly complex at a pace far faster than companies can grow their available technical networking engineering support staff, who by the same token are becoming increasingly unaffordable. In this environment, automation is no longer an option:…

8 “Fake News” Items that Tried to Hold Back Open Networking

The parallels between the efforts of the various open networking communities to modernize the networking industry and a Saturday afternoon pee-wee soccer scrum are far too close for comfort. Both are characterized by loads of noisy, colorful – and mostly circular – movement – eventually followed by…

Thanks, Arista! We’ll Leave a Light on for You

Wow. Just, wow. Here we were at Pica8, ten days away from announcing a screamingly simplified white box switching architecture for enterprise campus networks – one that makes legacy switch stack and chassis switch replacement with disaggregated white box switches ridiculously easy — when Arista…

Dismantling Cisco’s Conservation of Complexity Gambit

From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice — was an early move down this path. The next cab off this particular rank was…

Comment la commutation canalise Trader Joe’s

L’année 2018 est une année phénoménale pour être dans le secteur de la mise en réseau désagrégé. Il n’y a jamais eu un meilleur moment d’y être – non seulement pour les vendeurs, mais aussi pour les chefs d’entreprise eux-mêmes. Le marché pour l’innovation du réseau s’est enfin precisé après une…