Life is about moving from one journey to the next. Today marks exactly one of those changes.  Cisco announced their intent to acquire Embrane, which takes us to the next phase in our journey.

It’s been five exciting years since Marco and I founded Embrane. So many great memories come to mind – but I am even more excited about what we have in front of us. 

Joining Cisco gives us the opportunity to continue our journey and participate in one of the most significant shifts in the history of networking:  leading the industry to better serve application needs through integrated software-hardware models.  

At Embrane, we have demonstrated the ability to build products that accelerate the adoption of more agile models for virtualization and automation of networking capabilities in the data center. 

The networking DNA of Cisco and Embrane together drives our common vision for an Application Centric Infrastructure.  We both believe that innovation must be evolutionary and enable IT organizations to transition to their future state on their own terms – and with their own timelines.  It’s about coexistence of hardware with software and of new with legacy in a way that Continue reading

The hype surrounding SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and now NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is widely known.  As one of the first to enter the market of innovative network solutions, I have seen new players enter (and exit) while others have re-positioned themselves to try to get a share of the pie. I’m proud to say that we have remained committed to the vision we laid out at the beginning and are delivering real products to real customers that execute on that vision.

While championing the advantages and benefits that SDN enables, in many ways we steered clear of the hype around Layer 2 solutions created to solve problems that customers don’t have. We listened to customers that craved solutions that are disruptive, but not destructive.  We focused on delivering evolutionary solutions that provided new tools to the right people rather than forcing unnecessary organization and infrastructure changes; and our customers rewarded us with their investments.

Today, we are announcing our support for OpFlex, a new open, standards-based protocol that provides a unique mechanism to enable a network controller such as Cisco’s Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to transfer abstract policies to a set of “smart” devices capable of directly rendering Continue reading