This has been a pretty active week in terms of happenings of real relevance to the future of networking. We’ve also had some background stuff going on, things that don’t rise to the level of being part of the revolution for various reasons. Taken as a whole, they may be a signpost into how the revolution is proceeding at the tactical level, though.
HP, Brocade, and Arista all announced high-capacity data-center switches that supported OpenFlow and all of them made considerable hay on their SDN credentials with the products. It’s clear that SDN compatibility has street creds with the media, but less clear just how much buyers pay attention to it. The actual number of data centers that need this sort of support is limited but the players hope “the cloud” will fix that.
It’s not that I’m against an evolution to data center SDN, but I’m in favor of our actually having a value proposition to drive it. New technology walks a fine line between creating a new paradigm and offering bathroom reading, and what puts it decisively in one camp or the other is the benefit case that can be harnessed to justify deployment. Yes, cloud data centers will need massive scale. The overwhelming majority of users do not believe they’re building one as of last fall (we’ll be looking at their spring views in July). So the moral is that all this good SDN switching stuff has to drive not only SDN in the data center, but also cloud data center deployment, to get onto the value map. Which means SDN players should be a lot more cloud-literate than they are.
Alcatel-Lucent posted its quarterly results, which were certainly disappointing to them but not completely surprising to many Street analysts. Like Juniper’s results, Alcatel-Lucent’s had elements of good and bad, but the problem was that they didn’t prove a lot of progress toward a turnaround in sales (off about 22% sequentially). Investors are getting leery about companies who can sustain profits by cutting costs; all you need is a ruler to extend the lines and you cross the zero axis in a couple of years. Negative costs might be a concept of much greater value to the industry than SDN. Sharpen your pencils, MBAs! You have a future in technology after all.
The thing is, Alcatel-Lucent has what I believe to be the best SDN story of the lot. It’s not as much a matter of technology as a matter of scope; they have a vision of SDN that truly goes end-to-end in the network. If you focus on the cloud data center, you miss the cloud itself, the users who have to be the benefit drivers. Alcatel-Lucent has captured the broadest SDN footprint, and their only problem is (as I’ve said) a substandard job of positioning what they’ve done.
I just had a conversation with a network operator on the Alcatel-Lucent SDN story, and they didn’t know it was end to end. That, my friends, is a serious problem, and if Alcatel-Lucent wants to turn itself around it has to learn to be an effective seller and singer of technology anthems, and not just somebody who pushes geeks into a room until something new emerges, like fusion inside a star. Some of the financial pubs are calling Alcatel-Lucent dead, and while I don’t think it’s true now or even necessarily so in the long pull, I do think that poor positioning will be fatal if it’s not corrected. The one thing you cannot do in this industry and survive is fail to exploit your own value propositions.
HP, according to the media coverage of its switch launch, did the “fabric of the cloud”. Wrong. They did the fabric of the data center, and they hope that somehow the cloud is going to drive more data centers into a total capacity where fabric is needed. This, from a company who ought to be the poster-child of cloud value propositions. Look at all of the SDN and NFV stories that we’re hearing out there and you find the same sad kind of reductio ad absurdum; I want to focus on my own contribution and needs, not those of the buyers. Thus, I will hope that they figure out their value proposition on their own, ‘cause I darn sure can’t figure it out!
In SDN, in NFV, and even in the cloud, we have a very clear set of value propositions. The problem is that nobody wants to take the time and trouble to tell buyers about them. Are we, as an industry, so specialized in our work that nobody sees the big picture anymore? If that’s true, then there’s a problem that’s bigger than Alcatel-Lucent or HP, because we need the broadest possible benefit case to justify a revolutionary change, which is what SDN and NFV are supposed to bring us. When the benefits shrink, the revolution becomes two kids in a pillow fight. It’s time to step back from the minutiae and start from the top, where we should have started all along.