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Cisco ONE: Strategy Defined - Time to Execute

6/13/2012

2 Comments

 
If we use last year’s Interop as the OpenFlow/SDN coming out party, it took just over a year for Cisco to fully develop and announce a comprehensive multi-segment strategy.  Their SDN encompassing strategy is called Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE).  Congratulations, Cisco!  If they got David Ward back from Juniper sooner, maybe the strategy would have already been announced.  Joke…I really don’t have any insight as to who was or is responsible for the strategy, but would imagine it to be a fairly extensive team.

I think it was a good move to announce during Cisco LIVE.  Customers worship Cisco, not just for the products, solutions, architectures they develop, but also for this week long party where they receive gifts and gadgets, and soak up some of the most technical content in the industry, but most importantly can be around like-minded individuals.  That is the most important thing for those that are technically inclined and is often not understood by those who aren’t “down in the weeds.”

Even though it did take Cisco this long to develop an overall strategy, I can’t say they lost too much ground because many of the start-ups aren’t fully out of stealth either, but here is where I want to make a point.  Cisco is a $40+ Billion Dollar company with lots of existing customers.  They need to have a comprehensive multi-segment strategy.  Think Campus, Data Center, Cloud, and Service Provider.  This doesn’t make the Cisco ONE strategy an overarching architecture necessarily because the customer requirements and needs are different in each one of these “places in the network (PIN).”  Cisco even stated this today in their announcements, so to some degree, I’m just stating the obvious.  Side note:  I first heard PIN in a presentation from Mike Rau in about 2007 and I still like that acronym, I must say. 

So we need to remember, while there are many startups in the SDN space (BigSwitch, Nicira, Embrane, etc. just to name a few), each one is going after a niche, and who knows, will maybe expand from there.  My hope for Cisco is to fully commit or let a market go as it pertains to SDN, so we don’t see another CIUS happen (as Balaji already pointed out).  I’d rather see the BEST in a given area.  It sounds like they are going after SP first because they can monetize those solutions first, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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As I've been saying a lot these days, we have some interesting and fun times ahead.  Looking forward to it.

Thanks,

Jason (@jedelman8)

2 Comments
Omar Sultan link
6/15/2012 01:07:58 am

Jason:

You raise some reasonable questions, so let's see what I can do to answer them.

So part of the reason we have been stealth for so long is to take the time to really delve beyond the hype to a) understand what folks are really looking to accomplish and b) the best way to support them. We found out they really wanted to do myriad things and we needed a holistic approach to effectively support them--which lead us to Cisco ONE. From our perspective, we view network programability as a a horizontal function of the network--think of it like routing--we have more than one routing protocol because different folks have different needs and many folks end up running more than one protocol at the same time.

One of Cisco's advantages is commitment to R&D. In FY11 is was ~$5.3B or ~12% of total revenue on a Non-GAAP basis which usually puts us near the top of all IT companies both in terms of dollars and % of revenue. This allows us to move forward concurrently on a number of technical fronts. For example we can continue to invest in both the Nexus and Catalyst switching platforms or continue advocacy and development of FC or FCoE. Starts-up, by their very nature, need to be niche players. Ever since "Crossing the Chasm" folks have figured out that is the smart move. In terms of commitment, we have been working on onePK for over three years (check out Ric's blog http://blogs.cisco.com/getyourbuildon/onepk-building-applications-and-agents-on-apis-across-ciscos-network-oss-2/) and the Nexus 1000V, the keystone for our overlay solutions, has been shipping for over three years. The OF/SDN-specific products are relatively new for us (as it is for most folks, OF 1.0 was announced about 18 months ago) but its something we continue to explore with customers to see what they want in terms of implementable solutions. For the most part, they are in experimental mode and we are giving them tools they need to support that. Beyond that, we continue to stay active in the standards bodies that are helping this space to evolve and mature.

Finally, I think the Cius analogy made for a clever tweet, but it is a flawed analogy. While the fate of the Cius maybe linked to many things, I don't think lack of commitment is actually one of them. Personally, I think the market made a hard turn towards BYOD before the Cius strategy had a chance to play out. It happens. I am sure it will happen again (if we are not failing on occasion then we are not pushing hard enough), but I don't believe it will happen with ONE.

Will we have leadership across all three areas? Well, that is certainly our intent, but ultimately, as always, the market will decide. I think your title sums things out best. There are a lot of great ideas out there and there is a lot of powerpoint. The folks that execute are the ones that will end up shaping the market.

Regards,
Omar (@omarsultan)
Cisco

Reply
Jason Edelman (@jedelman8) link
6/15/2012 02:36:44 am

Omar, fancy seeing you here.

We must give kudos to Cisco this week. The strategy announced far outweighs the strategies announced from any other incumbent and large technology manufacturer. I would have attributed the length of time in stealth to the time required to create such good and lengthy collateral :).

As you point out, Cisco has loads of cash for R&D (along with resources), and given that, I don't think most would expect anything less from Cisco than a multi-pronged fully comprehensive strategy for network programmability. While network programmability is horizontal across the board as you point out, it will be completely different for each segment even assuming all Data Center, i.e. commercial, Enterprise, Web-Scale, SP. And even more different for Campus, WAN, etc., so with those differences, I don't think it's directly like routing protocols. Having the APIs available to the public is great, and I may be stating the obvious here, but it's more important for Cisco to develop some kick-ass applications (I'm sure you will) on top of your own API for the commercial and Enterprise segments across Campus, WAN, and the Data Center places in the network. Maybe I'm being selfish because those are the customers I support :) ...SP and web-scale will be fine on their own!

Ultimately, we are in agreement - it is time for everyone to execute now.

Thanks for commenting,
Jason

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    Jason Edelman, Founder of Network to Code, focused on training and services for emerging network technologies. CCIE 15394.  VCDX-NV 167.


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