It’s been awhile since I’ve been excited about Cisco and it’s networking strategy. While Cisco remains prominent in market share, it’s been Arista and Juniper that have dominated the networking innovation conversation. What do I mean when I say network innovation? I’m not talking bigger/better pipes or flashy new marketing products, but rather customer-centric solutions that real try to tackle the market’s real challenges today. But for the first time in a long time, Cisco has caught my attention. Big changes have started to ripple through Cisco as it slims down one of the industry’s largest routing, switching, and wireless product portfolios as it strives to:
- Untangle a mountain of complexity from acquisitions. Forrester’s “Let Business Outcomes Drive Network Design” report lays out the case that networking companies can no longer serve all industries and deliver solutions for every type of customer. Cisco recognizes this. It acquired a lot of companies over the last 20 years which bogged down its ability to react to market changes, such as SDWAN. Coordinating sales, research, support, and other activities across multiple products became too difficult—with CEO Chuck Robbins acknowledging customers deploying its products has become an Achilles Heel for the company.
- Address the rise of businesswide fabrics. Almost 10 years ago, Forrester developed five networking tenets for the next generation network. One of the tenets was the idea that businesses would create a consistent homogeneous network across the business. Traditional network segments defined a certain type of switch — such as data center, campus, and remote office LANs. This all changed with IoT and the dispersion of data and applications across private data centers, public clouds, and edge environments. A consistent way to manage, automate, and monitor would emerge. Cisco has recently acknowledge this concept by merging Meraki, Catalyst, and routing (SDWAN) product lines last year which shouldn’t be taken lightly. This change from the company’s mantra of “customer choice” is massive.
What’s relatively new and a bigger deal to me is the emergence of the Nexus Dashboard, once called Data Center Network Manager and Fabric Manager. The product aims to combine the ACI world and traditional Nexus world together. It’s the first step in addressing a businesswide fabric. The company has to eliminate multiple solutions within each segment.
I’m sure someone might argue Cisco’s proprietary approach to networking has caused them most of its issues. But closed solutions aren’t always bad. A lot of networking vendors that tout the cons of closed systems offer their own. For example, most offer closed Wi-Fi and ZTE (WAN and security) solutions. You would be hard pressed to mix and match SDWAN appliances/routers within SDWAN solutions or APs from various companies without having to use a management system from each one.
I digress. Ultimately the idea of treating a data center as an exclusive little island was never going to work as I highlighted in the 2013 “Networking Is A Hot Mess” blog. Since the emergence of OpenFlow and controller-based solutions, Forrester has advised clients against embracing that approach, which we highlighted in the 2013 research paper about Cisco’s ACI announcement and release. Since then, the graveyard has filled up with controller-based SDN solutions such as Big Switch Controller, OpenDaylight, Juniper Qfabric, to name a few. Ultimately Forrester predicts ACI and VMware’s NSX will close the controller-based SDN chapter for that era.
With the release of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, the company has entered the businesswide fabric race against Arista and Juniper, each of Cisco’s competitors have a sizable lead. To learn more about businesswide fabrics and what characteristics next generation networks should support, please read Forrester’s “Five Tenets Define Virtual Network Infrastructure, A Bold New Business Network“ report. Keep an eye out for another blog on other markets embracing businesswide networking fabrics.
