Simply put, Cisco is an amazing company. Love them, hate them, fear them, or fight them, but always respect them. While other large companies such as IBM and GE have “reinvented” themselves, few have done so prior to having a profound downturn in either market share and/or stock prices.
With an innocent blog post by Lew Tucker, Cisco VP and CTO of Cloud Computing, Cisco has invaded OpenStack under the guise of Networking. Remember, OpenStack was founded by NASA and Rackspace and currently has over 45 members with the mission of providing open source software to build public and private clouds. However, none of OpenStack’s members have the shear size or market power of Cisco.
In his post (http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-joins-openstack-community/) Lew writes:
In our view, dynamic provisioning of the network and network-based services is an essential element of cloud computing…
…To achieve this, we believe that it is best to join with others from across the industry to work on open technologies and that open source is the ideal way to reach developers and learn from the community…
My Take, Cisco is spending billions of dollars to insure their continuing dominance in networking and Cloud computing. By joining OpenStack, Cisco gains visibility into OpenStack’s interworking as well as the ability to influence the direction and speed of the project itself. As an added benefit, Cisco will learn from the community while having the ability to reach a set of talented developers that otherwise may never have engaged with Cisco.
Clearly, Cisco understands how to build complex partnerships across competitive lines. While VMware has vCloud, do they not work with other server vendors? Would EMC not sell a SAN to an HP customer? As a server vendor, Cisco is learning that choosing neutrality over products has its benefits especially when it comes to software.
While OpenStack is “hot” and an interesting project, they have their competitors as well with more coming. It remains to be seen if, “a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud computing operating system” is supportable and useable by mainstream Administrators and Enterprises. Perhaps this is what VMware is betting on with their vCloud solution.
One final note, where are the Operating System Vendors in this fight? Yes, Ubuntu is currently packaging applications like OpenStack and Eucalyptus but we need an integrated Cloud Operating System, not simply a collection of applications. Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, anyone….
PlatenReport 