9 ms·

> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going

by femto 10y ago

> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies? Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to be an unserviced niche for new players to move into? To use the specific example of Cisco: what hardware are Cisco planning to have their software running on in (for example) 5 years time?

monkmartinez 10y ago
|> With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? The manufacturers that have been actually making the hardware for the last 15 or more years, that's who. The only difference in many cases is the color and brand on the case.
maratd 10y ago
> With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? There's a ton of smaller players ready to jump in. They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc
- wsinks 10y ago
  Ubiquiti is the shit. Really clean APs.
- insaneirish 10y ago
  > They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc These companies have nothing to do with the businesses that make Cisco its real money. Growth in compute is from the cloud companies. They can purchase switches from ODMs like Edge-Core, Quanta, and Celestica directly. At the end of the day, because switching has largely converged on the same merchant silicon (Broadcom Trident/Tomahawk now, perhaps Barefoot Tofino in the future), they end up with a similar product at a lower price point. Either these companies are big enough that they have their own switch operating systems or they license one. It's simply a different world than a few years ago.
Trisell 10y ago
The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. So a company could buy 50 white box switches and slap IOS or JUNOS on them. In the networking world OSs are even more religious then the Microsoft Linux debates of the past. I know networking shops that will never buy anything but Cisco because they only know how to network on Cisco and they refuse to learn anything else. That is the market that Cisco is going to target.
- signa11 10y ago
  > Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.
  - Trisell 10y ago
    You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and SDN. These companies won't be selling hardware for the 1-200% markup the have enjoyed all these years.
    - signa11 10y ago
      > Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well. if that is true, they were already x86 compatible... with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the lack of trying though (if you know folks who have worked on ios, check with them, writing about it here, doesn't seem right)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kkhire 10y ago
hardware way cheaper to do in china
- gaius 10y ago
  So is software. What does Cisco actually expect its business to be in 5 years or 10 years? It's the next Yahoo.
  - kubuqi 10y ago
    Not really cheap for software... I worked for Cisco in Shanghai and I recall we were more expensive than our Ottawa friends.
mdani 10y ago
The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Facebook Open Compute) so the hardware spending has slowed down. (in tier 1 carrier I deal with, all new deployments must be on Openstack that uses whitelabel hardware purchased in bulk). EMC, Oracle, Cisco, HP are facing the impacts of such decisions.
- karma_vaccum123 10y ago
  > all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies
  - hueving 10y ago
    Better that then yet more money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud companies.
    - karma_vaccum123 10y ago
      How so? Most of the OpenStack stewards are as stodgy and corporate...
      - hueving 10y ago
        OpenStack is open source. It can be forked, modified, whatever. Let me know when you manage to build your own AWS cloud with Amazon's software and then I'll entertain the thought that they are comparable.
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      Its not about money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud providers, its about engineering hours being better spent. Openstack is bit of a mess.
fulafel 10y ago
Much of their hardware is just commodity x86 or ARM parts.
wazoox 10y ago
Edge Core builds something like 70% of all big names switches. You can buy an Edge-Core branded switch for a fraction of the price of a Cisco one, and run various OSes on it, mostly Linux-based (Pica8, Cumulus...). You can also run nmap, tcpdump, or whatever you want on it... Once you've tried it you won't look back :)
r_smart 10y ago
I expect eventually margins on hardware will come up and new players will enter. Maybe not, but the siren song of software's high margins and flexibility is only going to last so long. Innovation in hardware is going to slow down a lot, and software people are going to have to start worrying about efficiency again, and will no longer be as able to shrug optimization off onto Moore's Law or abstract away the hardware altogether. Some people will come in with new hardware, offering to alleviate those pains, and we'll have a healthy hardware market again. Or I'm totally wrong :)

by femto 10y ago

monkmartinez 10y ago

|> With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? The manufacturers that have been actually making the hardware for the last 15 or more years, that's who. The only difference in many cases is the color and brand on the case.

maratd 10y ago

> With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing the hardware? There's a ton of smaller players ready to jump in. They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc

wsinks 10y ago
Ubiquiti is the shit. Really clean APs.
insaneirish 10y ago
> They're not household names, but they have the expertise to fill the gap. I wouldn't worry about it. Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, etc These companies have nothing to do with the businesses that make Cisco its real money. Growth in compute is from the cloud companies. They can purchase switches from ODMs like Edge-Core, Quanta, and Celestica directly. At the end of the day, because switching has largely converged on the same merchant silicon (Broadcom Trident/Tomahawk now, perhaps Barefoot Tofino in the future), they end up with a similar product at a lower price point. Either these companies are big enough that they have their own switch operating systems or they license one. It's simply a different world than a few years ago.

Trisell 10y ago

The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware. Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. So a company could buy 50 white box switches and slap IOS or JUNOS on them. In the networking world OSs are even more religious then the Microsoft Linux debates of the past. I know networking shops that will never buy anything but Cisco because they only know how to network on Cisco and they refuse to learn anything else. That is the market that Cisco is going to target.

signa11 10y ago
> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.
- Trisell 10y ago
  You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. Between whitebox and SDN. These companies won't be selling hardware for the 1-200% markup the have enjoyed all these years.
  - signa11 10y ago
    > Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well. if that is true, they were already x86 compatible... with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the lack of trying though (if you know folks who have worked on ios, check with them, writing about it here, doesn't seem right)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kkhire 10y ago

hardware way cheaper to do in china

gaius 10y ago
So is software. What does Cisco actually expect its business to be in 5 years or 10 years? It's the next Yahoo.
- kubuqi 10y ago
  Not really cheap for software... I worked for Cisco in Shanghai and I recall we were more expensive than our Ottawa friends.

mdani 10y ago

The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough (e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Facebook Open Compute) so the hardware spending has slowed down. (in tier 1 carrier I deal with, all new deployments must be on Openstack that uses whitelabel hardware purchased in bulk). EMC, Oracle, Cisco, HP are facing the impacts of such decisions.

karma_vaccum123 10y ago
> all new deployments must be on Openstack you have my sympathies
- hueving 10y ago
  Better that then yet more money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud companies.
  - karma_vaccum123 10y ago
    How so? Most of the OpenStack stewards are as stodgy and corporate...
    - hueving 10y ago
      OpenStack is open source. It can be forked, modified, whatever. Let me know when you manage to build your own AWS cloud with Amazon's software and then I'll entertain the thought that they are comparable.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Its not about money funneling into the pockets of the big cloud providers, its about engineering hours being better spent. Openstack is bit of a mess.

fulafel 10y ago

Much of their hardware is just commodity x86 or ARM parts.

wazoox 10y ago

Edge Core builds something like 70% of all big names switches. You can buy an Edge-Core branded switch for a fraction of the price of a Cisco one, and run various OSes on it, mostly Linux-based (Pica8, Cumulus...). You can also run nmap, tcpdump, or whatever you want on it... Once you've tried it you won't look back :)

r_smart 10y ago

I expect eventually margins on hardware will come up and new players will enter. Maybe not, but the siren song of software's high margins and flexibility is only going to last so long. Innovation in hardware is going to slow down a lot, and software people are going to have to start worrying about efficiency again, and will no longer be as able to shrug optimization off onto Moore's Law or abstract away the hardware altogether. Some people will come in with new hardware, offering to alleviate those pains, and we'll have a healthy hardware market again. Or I'm totally wrong :)