I’ve been watching to see how long it would take for network vendors to begin to recognize the need for something more than pushing boxes, and we have indications that for some at least the time may be here. Don’t expect sudden logic from these guys; there’s an internal culture to fight whose inertia has to be seen to be believed. But maybe the head-in-the-sand period is ending, and competitive pressure may spread the effect to the whole market.
Cisco, who has recently added to its line of UCS servers, is reported by UBS to be working seriously on OpenFlow and SDN, with the intention of being a leader in this space. OpenFlow is a standard protocol for supporting networks where connection must be explicit, a major shift from the discovered-route model of Ethernet and IP. While the governmental, educational, and resource support for OpenFlow made it hard for any vendor to ignore, I’d not really expected any to get behind it in a meaningful way, and now the story is that Cisco will do just that.
Inside a cloud, not only in the data center but between data centers, OpenFlow could have significant benefits because it’s inherently more secure and easier to traffic-engineer for specific service levels. It would fit well with a data center switching strategy, which is apparently where Cisco intends to include it. From there, expansion to the cloud isn’t rocket science, and Cisco might therefore be the first to provide what’s coming to be called “Network as a Service”, a cloud-connectivity model. Interestingly, the cloud and any cloud application (specifically CDNs) are exempt from net neutrality even in the narrow FCC conception.
The “inside-the-cloud” point here is critical. Cisco, with UCS servers, has the best logical jumping-off point for a cloud story, but it’s not yet been able to come up with anything that’s transformational. In fact, network vendors have been struggling to come up with any compelling reason to think the cloud will change the network and that there’s any special contribution that the network can make. If Cisco gets these two developments together and then sings a pretty song (John Chambers, after all, is the industry’s master crooner) they could really grab control of this space.
Another development is Ericsson’s Smart Services Router (SSR), hardly the first “smart” edge device announced (Cisco and Juniper also have them) but possibly the first that really makes any case for edge intelligence by linking edge routing with FMC and also with experience management. Operators who have looked at the SSR tell me they think it’s a significant advance over competitive products, and I think what they’re really doing is reading a new and more hardware-directed way Ericsson is positioning its assets.
Ericsson is one of the most savvy of the network vendors, but it’s tended to bias its strategic vision on professional services, OSS/BSS, and other stuff that’s not only “not-news” and hard to position to the media, it’s disconnected from the major monetization initiatives. Even now, some operators who are early adopters of SSR are not really looking at Ericsson in monetization projects that are actively underway during the SSR deployment (again, this sort of sales disconnect from strategic positioning isn’t uncommon for network equipment vendors).
Ericsson could in theory use SSR to make the service-to-equipment connection that everyone has been struggling to make. If they do, then their initiative not only impacts players like Cisco and Juniper who have also launched new smart-edge products, it could impact players like Alcatel-Lucent who is still struggling to link its service layer to network equipment, and NSN who is divesting itself of non-mobile lines of business and may not have a network to link to. And remember, Ericsson also has a strong optical portfolio, and no big-iron router core position to defend. Could they be a contender for leading the next-gen optical core advances? Maybe, but Huawei clearly wants to take a run at that space, and Huawei’s optical strategy seems more metro-focused, where I think the real need will be. Video traffic is intra-CDN-and-metro after all. And as I’ve said before, I think OpenFlow could play a role in the optical core too, if it’s melded with other IP-discovery schemes.