Cisco's Chambers: white box is dead and WE KILLED IT Cisco's now-outgoing CEO John Chambers has reiterated his belief that the Borg has already beaten off the white-box market. In an interview with CNBC – transcript here (with editing suggesting voice recognition rather than human transcription) – Chambers says that extending the company's lock-in strategy across platforms and …
Nothing will get a Cisco sales rep to drop their price faster than a lab test demonstrating that a white box with a Broadcom switch in it can do the job of a Cisco <insert product here> for 1/10th the price.
Oh, and the white box will have an REST API, which is something the rep can't spell, and the config managed and version controlled by mere mortals using something like Puppet or Chef, or heck, even bash for you old school types.
It's this glib, arrogant, "We've already won" attitude that sinks empires.
Cisco is already in trouble....AWS, Google and others use those whiteboxes in huge volumes, and their ODM makers do a great job of quality (heck, they make switches for Cisco too!)
We just need a year for the software explosion that's coming, and it will be Linux versus the mainframe again! We know who won that one!
Cisco is 'ok' at certain levels.
We previously used an opensource routing infrastructure and were expanding quickly.
I needed something with support in case things went sideways.
We did Cisco end to end.
Problem is that as we've grown, both our routing speed requirements and security needs have grown, and Cisco doesn't scale up very well.
So, as an smb we grew into and out of Cisco in a space of about 3 years.
We'll probably stay with Cisco for the swtch fabric, but not for routing and security.
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