Cisco/Cariden in the Enterprise. We'll have to wait and see.

Not much time to blog about this today, so this will be short, but another nice move for Cisco by announcing the acquisition of Cariden.  This is being seen by most as a great SP SDN play for Cisco, which indeed it is.  But remember, Service Providers have complex requirements, usually much more complex than Enterprises.  This means Enterprises may only need a portion of the Cariden solution to start dabbling in SDN that is available today, not in 6 months or not in 2 years.  So yes, Cariden was acquired for $141M and they do in fact have shipping products today, which is rare in the new and upcoming SDN community.  With that said, please note that Cariden had also announced integration with Big Switch’s Floodlight open source controller targeted at Enterprises.  With Enterprises potentially only needing a subset of Cariden’s actual feature set, I’m sure we may now see portions of Cariden’s application suite integrated as northbound applications riding on top of Cisco’s ONE SDN controller that is coming sometime next year letting Cisco provide an end to end solution potentially equivalent to the one Google announced last year at ONS.

One fun fact to note is that Cariden was NOT part of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) as currently listed on their site.  That list is used by me and many others to stay close on who’s doing what in the SDN community, so for me, this acquisition was a bit of a surprise, but after reading many of the articles published today, it makes sense – clearly, lots of sense for Cariden and Cisco.  With this acquisition Cisco will be able to hold true to how they want to define their strategy, i.e. keeping the hardware smart while only extracting portions of the control plane as needed all while keeping the protocols that work and are proven in the SP space.

Congratulations to both teams.

-Jason

Twitter: @jedelman8

PS – If I have time later I’ll insert the hyperlinks to the other articles and events mentioned throughout this post.  Just short on time today.