There may be nothing that so starkly presents the two very different visions of the future of networking than the “two i’s”. By this I refer to the contrast between Apple’s i-software-focused WWDC and the investment discussions of two key network vendors—Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper.
Apple’s WWDC was a disappointment if you believe that every one of these events has to launch a new device. There was no Apple TV (I’ll come back to that) and there were new models of iPhones or iPads. What Apple seemed to be doing was tidying up its software picture and making a few changes to iCloud. Does that mean Apple isn’t going to move and shake? Ha!
I think Apple still means what Jobs suggested a year ago; iCloud would make PCs and Macs just another kind of device. The WWDC announcements on Mac OS (Mountain Lion) tightened the integration between iCloud and the Mac line, which allows Apple to do more of the kind of integration of the cloud and the PC that we’ve seen from Google and Microsoft with their “drive” products, for example. Both Google and Microsoft have pushed the notion that their cloud extends to devices as well as desktops/laptops, too. Google even bought QuickOffice to improve its inside/outside assault on Microsoft’s office. So is Apple going to do that too? Yes, of course.
The cloud has become the name given to a transformation of the Internet to a world of online services rather than a world of content. That transformation is going to remake the Internet in a more radical way than, say, the IPv6 transformation we just experienced (as, so far, a non-event despite decades of hype). It’s the cloud transformation that will be the proximate driver of the network transformation, which brings us to the other side of the picture with Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper.
Alcatel-Lucent had a shareholder meeting and got blasted for their lack of stock appreciation. Juniper is having their analyst day today, talking about their own business model. In the last year, Cisco’s stock has gone up just a bit, while Juniper’s is down over 40% and Alcatel-Lucent’s is down about 70%. You can see why investors might be antsy. So what does the investment “i” have to do with the Apple “i”? The answer is that the cloud transformation I noted here has been around for just as long in the network space as in the appliance space. Why then has one player grasped it and these others not?
One old friend I have at Alcatel-Lucent suggested that their problem was management-by-objectives gone wild, little-i not adding up to a big vision. They have all kinds of objectives, but they don’t add up to a strategy. At Juniper you kind of have the “big-i” problem, meaning that the company itself seems possessed of a persona that can’t look beyond its own property line. Juniper made the first public presentation of the cloud that I ever saw, but despite the passage of three years and multiple new products, they still don’t have any clear vision of why the cloud is different and how they’ve demonstrated their understanding.
SDN and OpenFlow are catalysts and symptoms of the network view of the cloud. They’re catalysts because they articulate some of the fundamental changes that the cloud brings, the most obvious and significant of which is the notion of full application control over network behavior. They’re symptoms because both concepts have been driven by attempts to relate the network to the cloud and not to evolve the cloud from the network. For the service providers and their vendors, it’s that cloud-out-of-network theme that’s critical. Who among them is articulating it?
Here’s the truth behind the “i”. Apple knows that network services are bought from the outside in. We know the network by what it does for us, and so if it’s doing nothing but pushing bits around it’s not very interesting or valuable. Yes, you need it if you want the iPhone to work or iCloud to sync your stuff, but your goal is the sync and not the bit. Apple has an outside-in vision, a vision that aligns with the money flow in any service. The Alcatel-Lucents and Junipers of the world are still stuck on the inside, for no reason other than process. Fix it, guys, while there’s still time and know there’s precious little time to do that. Apple’s not waiting for you.