The Week Ahead: June 24, 2013

The most read post on my blog was written on February 22, 2012.  It was about the Cisco spin-in called Insieme.  It has been read thousands of times and still holds the single day read record for my blog.  I do not consider it the best post I have written, but I am looking forward to reviewing it and measuring the accuracy of the prediction this week.  I really do not know what Insieme is building, but if these reports here and here are true, we should all have some form of clarity this week.

The rumored Cisco announcement is occurring only two months after Arista announced their latest switch the 7500E.  The Insieme reveal at CLUS should serve as the benchmark for the state of the art and network innovation from Silicon Valley.  Cisco reportedly invested $100M into Insieme and valued the company at $750M.  $100M is quite a development budget.  In comparison, an experienced development team of about 35-40 people would take about eighteen months to develop a first generation controller driven ethernet switch based on merchant silicon.

Not to be forgotten in all the news is the reveal of Cumulus Networks at Structure this past week.  Is Cumulus the state of the art?  Will Insieme set the standard?  Does Arista have one switch to rule them all?  What are all the other players doing?  Are we just back where we started?

/wrk