I’m a delegate for Mobility Field Day 12, and am writing this a week ahead of the event. There are two vendors presenting, but both have an interesting connection. As I contemplate just the companies as I think I know them, I’m struck by the notion of Legacy versus New Approach. Read nothing into that- Legacy isn’t always bad and New Approach sometimes isn’t great. I’m certainly looking forward to what Cisco and Nile each have to say at MFD12. but pre-presentation contemplation is inevitable. Here’s where my head is at right this second.
Something Old in this case is Cisco. They have been in the wireless (and therefor mobility) game since way back in the day when they bought Aironet and this thing was new and sexy:
That was right about when dirt was invented. Cisco would go on to produce new access points for every 802.11 standard as they rolled out, and they made the jump to “lightweight” and controller-based WLAN with the acquisition of Airespace in 2005. Then in 2012, Cisco bought Meraki to get cloudy when all the cool kids realized cloud was the shizzle. Now today, we see see Cisco is set to End of Everything their once-flagship WLC controllers and the AireOS-based products while they also try to shoehorn their current generation Cisco-side wireless products into the Meraki framework. There’s a lot going on, and has been with wireless at Cisco for many, many years. While trying to leverage the Meraki Magic for full-stack cloud-management, they are also still trying to get revenue from the controller crowd where they can while perpetually coming up with new and innovative ways to license the holy bajeezuz out of everything and anything. I’m looking forward to what is new and exciting from Cisco.
Then there’s Nile. Something New in my narrative, Nile is pretty fresh to the network industry scene and is trying to push Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) as The Next Big Thing. It’s interesting to me, being a network geezer, that the Nile product web pages are far more about saving you TCO costs with NaaS than they are about product specifications. I *think* that you are supposed to be buying “don’t sweat it, we’ll bring in the right stuff and you don’t need to worry about what that stuff is” and eliminating the need to scrutinize data sheets and find the right models for yourself. If you dig, you’ll get to the models in play, but they aren’t the lead story. And Nile appears to not just be wireless but maybe full-stack with “service blocks”. I’ll know more when I hear their presentations, but I can maybe see why this model is threatening to network architects and engineers if that’s the angle.
Now here’s the interesting part- if you look at the Who’s Who at Nile, you’ll find many People of Title that used to be at Cisco. I have sat through several Cisco “lower your cost of TCO!” meetings through the years, where those looking to lower my TCO never bothered to ask what my TCO actually was- the whole premise was built on canned assumptions that made for nice marketing but generally fell apart in spots pretty quick when examined through the lens of reality. Is the drumbeat of “Lower your TCO!” by Nile just being played by ex-Cisco players who were fond of the same marketing strategy at the Big C? Or is Nile truly onto something new and valid? I suppose white box hardware might help with lower costs, but now I’m speculating. The Nile presentation should be interesting, and even maybe provocative.
Did I mention that I’m a geezer? Almost thirty years in the industry makes you think about things maybe a bit differently than the vendors would like, but us geezers have our own frames of reference and we’re stuck with them.