Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

Like Watching the Caveman Invent the Rock – Cisco “Discovers” Software

In truth, today’s legacy enterprise networks — many now decades overdue for replacement — were built to fight Cold Wars among the vendor powers.  Cisco “big iron” battled Wellfleet “big iron” and, later, Juniper “big iron,” and the throughput/density contests are now the stuff of NetOps legend.  But these aging networks are completely ill-suited to fight today’s data-oriented guerilla warfare, where hackers, DevOps, IoT, mobile, open source, and cloud services clamor for attention and have NetOps IT people desperately trying to manage an environment that feels more like a third-world airport terminal flooded with people fleeing a coup than a predictable business utility.

To be fair, Cisco was able to successfully weaponize account control far better than Juniper, Extreme, et al, so they ended up “winning” – and keeping — the large enterprise business to the tune of some 80 percent market share.  But this business stranglehold can no longer be defended by the moral equivalent of a proprietary Maginot Line.  The new name of the networking guerilla warfare game is software.  The new “best practice?” — disaggregated Linux-based open white box switching with a full enterprise feature set – one that is future-proofed with Continue reading

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 suddenly pops up and says that the success white box switches are having in the data center is now well and truly annoying to them, so they are starting to plan a future expedition to the enterprise campus in search of replacing lost revenue.

But after blowing straight past total market validation for us – we already have a number of ongoing enterprise campus network deployments inside some of Cisco’s oldest and largest accounts – Arista then went on to articulate the changes they envision for their future campus network switching push and, in doing so, came very close to a one-to-one mapping with what we’ve just announced as an orderable solution with our new PicaPilot switch orchestration software (see link below). (I really must order a case of champagne for my friends over there.)

Just how close is the mapping?  Well, let’s start with solving the urgent requirement to simplify Continue reading

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 suddenly pops up and says that the success white box switches are having in the data center is now well and truly annoying to them, so they are starting to plan a future expedition to the enterprise campus in search of replacing lost revenue.

But after blowing straight past total market validation for us – we already have a number of ongoing enterprise campus network deployments inside some of Cisco’s oldest and largest accounts – Arista then went on to articulate the changes they envision for their future campus network switching push and, in doing so, came very close to a one-to-one mapping with what we’ve just announced as an orderable solution with our new PicaPilot switch orchestration software (see link below). (I really must order a case of champagne for my friends over there.)

Just how close is the mapping?  Well, let’s start with solving the urgent requirement to simplify Continue reading

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 the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

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 the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

Comment la commutation « White Box » 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 longue balade à travers le désert qui compose la piété du SDN académique, et le hardware sur lequel fonctionne l ‘infrastructure réseau désagrégé basé sur le Linux est maintenant de calibre mondiale – les mêmes ASICs et le même hardware qu’utilisent les vendeurs actuels, et probablement les mêmes câbles électriques, si l’on digne regarder d’assez près.

Alors où entre Trader Joe’s – un supermarché américain très performant – dans cette équation ? En quatre mots: la proposition de valeur. Alors que les vendeurs de l’OS réseau « white box » comme Pica8 n’ont pas délibérément cherché à émuler les valeurs de l’entreprise Trader Joe’s, il s’avère que c’est plus ou moins ce que nous avons fait. La configuration de nos valeurs est curieusement similaire.

Meilleure qualité au moindre coût? Oui.

Service et réactivité comme buts principaux? Encore oui.

Utiliser les mêmes produits que nos plus grands compétiteurs, mais sans noms de marque? Continue reading

Comment la commutation « White Box » 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 longue balade à travers le désert qui compose la piété du SDN académique, et le hardware sur lequel fonctionne l ‘infrastructure réseau désagrégé basé sur le Linux est maintenant de calibre mondiale – les mêmes ASICs et le même hardware qu’utilisent les vendeurs actuels, et probablement les mêmes câbles électriques, si l’on digne regarder d’assez près.

Alors où entre Trader Joe’s – un supermarché américain très performant – dans cette équation ? En quatre mots: la proposition de valeur. Alors que les vendeurs de l’OS réseau « white box » comme Pica8 n’ont pas délibérément cherché à émuler les valeurs de l’entreprise Trader Joe’s, il s’avère que c’est plus ou moins ce que nous avons fait. La configuration de nos valeurs est curieusement similaire.

Meilleure qualité au moindre coût? Oui.

Service et réactivité comme buts principaux? Encore oui.

Utiliser les mêmes produits que nos plus grands compétiteurs, mais sans noms de marque? Continue reading

How White Box Networking is Channeling Trader Joe’s

2018 is a particularly good time to be in the disaggregated networking business. Truth is, it’s never been better – either for the vendors or for the enterprise network managers themselves. The market for network innovation has finally sorted itself out after a long wander through the desert of academic SDN piety, and the hardware that disaggregated Linux-based NOS software runs on is now world class – same ASICs and hardware the legacy guys use, probably even the same power cords if you look close enough.

So where does Trader Joe’s – a highly successful retail food store innovator in the US – possibly come into this equation? Two words: value proposition. While white box NOS vendors like Pica8 did not deliberately set out to emulate the basic business values of Trader Joe’s, it turns out that, well, we basically did.  The mapping is eerily similar.

Higher quality at lower cost? Check.

A focus on service and responsiveness? Double check.

Using the same product sources as their larger competitors but without brand-name labels? Triple check.

And, finally, having absolutely everything you need to make a great meal/network without burying you under unnecessary options that make your head spin? Quadruple Continue reading

How White Box Networking is Channeling Trader Joe’s

2018 is a particularly good time to be in the disaggregated networking business. Truth is, it’s never been better – either for the vendors or for the enterprise network managers themselves. The market for network innovation has finally sorted itself out after a long wander through the desert of academic SDN piety, and the hardware that disaggregated Linux-based NOS software runs on is now world class – same ASICs and hardware the legacy guys use, probably even the same power cords if you look close enough.

So where does Trader Joe’s – a highly successful retail food store innovator in the US – possibly come into this equation? Two words: value proposition. While white box NOS vendors like Pica8 did not deliberately set out to emulate the basic business values of Trader Joe’s, it turns out that, well, we basically did.  The mapping is eerily similar.

Higher quality at lower cost? Check.

A focus on service and responsiveness? Double check.

Using the same product sources as their larger competitors but without brand-name labels? Triple check.

And, finally, having absolutely everything you need to make a great meal/network without burying you under unnecessary options that make your head spin? Quadruple Continue reading

AT&T’s dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)

One thing that’s clear from recent events is that the “alternative” path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs – disaggregation – has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T’s recent announcement of the company’s dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative. Actually, prior to this proposal the fact that Pica8 and Cumulus – the only two pure open-standards-based NOS vendors in the market – combined have close to 2,000 current customers running on common hardware suggests that it’s been pretty exciting for some time now.

But AT&T’s new proposal does present us with a perfect opportunity to finally throw a bright spotlight on the palette of Fake News that has been tossed around the industry about disaggregated networking solutions and white-box networking in general. Of course, the elephant in the networking room is always Cisco, so let’s start there to see why AT&T pushed out this proposal in the first place.

Over the years, Cisco has successfully stared down any real threats to its account-control-plus-per-hardware-port-revenue business model, building itself up to the hegemony that it has today and, in the process, inadvertently laying waste to its customers’ ability to innovate in their own market segments based on differentiated network services. Continue reading

AT&T’s dNOS Initiative Spotlights Fake News from Cisco (et al.)

One thing that’s clear from recent events is that the “alternative” path for network infrastructure refresh and build-outs – disaggregation – has just become exciting again due, in part, to AT&T’s recent announcement of the company’s dNOS (disaggregated Networking Operating System) initiative. Actually, prior to this proposal the fact that Pica8 and Cumulus – the only two pure open-standards-based NOS vendors in the market – combined have close to 2,000 current customers running on common hardware suggests that it’s been pretty exciting for some time now.

But AT&T’s new proposal does present us with a perfect opportunity to finally throw a bright spotlight on the palette of Fake News that has been tossed around the industry about disaggregated networking solutions and white-box networking in general. Of course, the elephant in the networking room is always Cisco, so let’s start there to see why AT&T pushed out this proposal in the first place.

Over the years, Cisco has successfully stared down any real threats to its account-control-plus-per-hardware-port-revenue business model, building itself up to the hegemony that it has today and, in the process, inadvertently laying waste to its customers’ ability to innovate in their own market segments based on differentiated network services. Continue reading