Odd Week of News and Notes

An odd week of news and notes.  Truth be told, there is not a lot that I am really motivated to write about, but there were a number of noteworthy articles and videos during the week.  Here is my run down of things I read or watched during the week:

1. About mid week I started to see all these hits on my blog from Networkworld.  Jim Duffy had listed my blog on a list of useful Cisco blogs.  Kind of cool and thanks to Jim.  With that maybe I should write something about Cisco.

2. Here is a link to an interview that John Chambers did with Reuters.  At the ~4 min mark he talks about market and technology (~7 min mark) transitions, the next big thing, etc.  I really have to wonder what transitions they have organically caught over the years?  The Flip phone?  No.  Cable business?  No, they bought that in the form of SA.  I think Cisco is a sales machine, but they bought Crescendo and rolled up the switching market in mid-1990s.  They bought Webex, they bought SA, bought a bunch of optical companies that were a disaster.  They buy a lot of companies, they are not innovators and they do not catch market transitions.  They buy technology and market transitions.  There is nothing wrong with that, but the company is not visionary in nature.  They wait till customers tell them to buy into a market in the form of a company.  As for what customers think of Cisco, this article is on a general level representative of what I hear in the market.

3.  Yesterday I read this article on SDN. Speaking of Cisco, it is full of quotes from Cisco:

The operative word in the term software defined network isn’t software. It’s defined, said David Yen, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s data center group. He said networks need to be defined by the applications that are using them. “It’s a change in perspective,” Yen said. ‘It’s really an evolution of this art of networking intelligence. And furthermore, a lot of the SDN idea is actually blending in some of the functions and features that traditional data center management software is doing. People are turning their attention more and more to the application perspective,” Yen said. “For the ease of developing applications and for the ease and effectiveness of deploying applications, it’s the right time for the underlying infrastructure to serve whatever the application desires.”

From Plexxi’s perspective, it is really great to read senior leaders at the marquee name in the industry adopting our view.  We agree that networks need to be defined by the applications that use them, rather than those pesky distributed protocols trying to figure out state and we certainly think that the underlying network infrastructure should be reflective of the application requirements.

4. Sounds like a tough week for the Juniper QFabric team if this article is correct.

5. Did I mention that Plexxi was listed as a hot startup by the WSJ?  Yea…#12.

Wrapping up what I wrote: Cisco does not get market transitions, they buy them.  Cisco SVP of Data centers thinks SDN is about applications.  Juniper QFabric team downsized.  Plexxi next big thing and we think that applications matter, and the NFL finally fixed the mess and Goodell should not be back or I should get a refund for 3/16ths of my season tickets value.

/wrk