There are a couple of recent news items that involve a big player, and while the focus of the news is different I think there is a common theme to be found. One is a little impromptu talk reported on Beet.tv from Cisco’s John Chambers at CES, and the other is Oracle’s acquisition of SDN vendor Corente. Both mix a healthy dose of interest and hype, so we need to look at them a bit to extract the pearls of wisdom—and there are some.
I have to confess that I’m finding the progress of Cisco’s descriptions of the Internet’s evolution entertaining. We started with the “Internet” then the “Internet of Things”, now the “Internet of Everything.” Next, perhaps, is the “Internet of Stephen Hawking Multidimensional Space-Time.” Underneath the hyperbole, though, Chambers make a valid point in his little talk. We are coming to a stage where what’s important on the Internet isn’t “information” but the fusion of information into contextual relevance. Mobile devices have turned people from being Internet researchers into being Internet-driven almost completely.
The problem I have in calling this a useful insight is that I don’t think Chambers then makes use of it. He jumps into NDS and GUIs, skipping over the fact that what is really needed for context-fusing is a combination of a rich vision of what “context” means and a means of filtering information flows through that vision. It’s a made-for-the-cloud problem, and Cisco purports to be driving to cloud leadership, so it would be nice to have it lead here.
Cisco could easily build a story of context-driven information and event filtering; they have nearly all the platform tools they’d need, the underlying servers and network elements, and the right combination of enterprise and operator customers to push solutions to. The kind of network that Chambers is indirectly describing is one where “the cloud” pushes all the way to the edge, and where users and apps grab onto a context agent in the cloud to shop, or eat, or talk, or think, (or whatever) through. In this model, you actually consume a lot of capacity because you want to get all of the information and all the context resources connected to these context agents through low-latency pipes so the user gets what they want quickly. By the way, these pipes, being inside the cloud, are immune from neutrality rules even under the current regulations.
There’s really no good reason not to push this vision, either. It’s not going to overhang current Cisco products, it’s not going to demand new channels or new buyer relationships. It supports the operator goals of monetization better than Cisco has supported them to date, and it could be applied to enhance worker productivity and thus drive up the benefit case that funds network investment on the business side. We seem to have an example of knee-jerk evangelism here; Cisco is so used to spinning a yarn then putting a box in front of the listener that they can’t put a concept there instead—even a good one.
Oracle’s acquisition of Corente has its own elements of theater. The description of Corente as an SDN offering is a stretch, IMHO. It’s a tunnel-overlay system created by linking edge devices with hosting platforms, for the purposes of delivering an application set. It’s sort-of-cloud, sort-of-NFV, sort-of-SDN, but it’s not a massive piece of any of the three. It could in fact be a useful tool in cloud hybridization, as any overlay virtual network could be that runs end to end. It’s not clear to me how well it integrates with carrier infrastructure, how it could influence network behavior or take advantage of specific network features.
There is sense to this; an application overlay or virtual network that manages connectivity separate from transport is a notion I’ve always liked, and in fact I’ve said that the two-layer model of SDN (connectivity and transport) is the right approach. It’s logical in my view to think of the future network as an underlying transport process that serves a series of service- and application-specific connection networks. Connectivity and connection rights must be managed by the applications or at the application level, but you don’t want applications messing with transport policies or behaviors. Thus, Oracle has a good point—if you could convince them to make it rather than saying it’s “software-defined WAN virtualization”. That seems to me little more than taking tunnels and wrapping them in the Holy Mantle of SDN.
And that’s what it appears to be. At the technical level you have to offer some way to connect my two layers of SDN so you’re not riding best-efforts forever, and at the high positioning level you have to make it clear that’s what you’re doing. Corente didn’t do that on their site and Oracle didn’t do it in the announcement. Other vendors like Alcatel-Lucent have articulated end-to-end visions that tie down into infrastructure, which is a much better approach (particularly for network operators who need to make their networks valuable).
This is one of those times when you could speculate on the reasons why Cisco or Oracle would do something smart but do it stupidly. One, they did an opportunistic thing for opportunistic reasons and by sheer chance it happened it had relevance to real problems. Since they didn’t care about those problems, they didn’t catch the relevance. Two, they did a smart thing for smart reasons and just don’t understand how to articulate anything that requires more than third-grade-level writing and thinking. Three, we have a media/market process incapable of digesting anything other than “Dick and Jane do telecom”. Probably all of the above, which is why I’m not going to spend much time trying to pick from that list of cynical possibilities.
Ultimately, the smarts will out. Again, it’s not constructive to predict whether startups will jump in (somehow making the VCs believe this is all part of social networking and then working under the table, perhaps) or that some major vendor will hire a CEO who actually does understand market requirements and has the confidence and organizational drive of a Marine Gunnery Sergeant. The question is how much vendors lose in the time it takes for this to happen.