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Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch

I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—

  • Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
  • Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
  • Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
  • People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
  • There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this

Let’s think about these a little more deeply.

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