OCP Summit 2015: Open Networking as the Norm
Open Networking Thrives at the 2015 OCP Summit
A few weeks ago I passed my 2 year work anniversary at Cumulus Networks. In this short amount of time we’ve helped change the networking industry as a whole. This statement may seem a bit bold, but I feel it’s justified and we’ve all earned it. I’ll attempt to back this up with a few anecdotes collected along the journey — the men and women of Cumulus Networks, along with our great partners and customers, deserve the credit here.
When I was first hired, our on-boarding process was a bit … unconventional to say the least. The first week included JR (our CEO and cofounder) taking a headshot photo for the website (at that time it was just a Brady Bunch collage of pictures, not much else) and being issued a switch for “jailbreaking.” Now jailbreaking is a bit of an extreme term, but in these dark days before open networking, the software and hardware for networks were tightly coupled together. Items such as debugging headers, a soldering iron, and even a bit of swearing were all part of the installation process on a fresh hardware platform. Fast forward to today, Continue reading