The one sure way to protect that market share is to offer better products than do competitors, says Kerravala, adding that Cisco has a record of introducing innovations that go beyond established standards and even helps set them. Examples include the Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP) alternative to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, and Cisco's proprietary Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) technology.
"Cisco had a PoE product years ahead of competitors who were all waiting for the standard to be set," he says.
It's not uncommon for technology companies to develop products based on industry standards and, in parallel, develop proprietary products, or for standards-setting bodies to each set separate standards, states Jon Oltsik, a principal analyst at the research firm Enterprise Strategy Group. Vendors can come out with products that support a standard like OpenFlow, but they can also "brace and extend" the standard, he explains, by adding APIs and other features unique to them. Also, Cisco had developed one standard for virtual switching technology while other vendors built to another standard. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ended up certifying them both, he says.
"Cisco may decide that rather than wait around for a consortium to push through standards and deliberate on the next version ... they may just decide that it's in the company's best interest to go ahead and do that on a proprietary basis," says Oltsik.
But standards-setting consortia or groups exist so that customers have a choice of vendors whose products are based on a protocol that is tested and proven, counters Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation, which is promoting the OpenFlow protocol.
"The end customers we talked to ... view 'proprietary standards' as an oxymoron," he says, adding that while there are other potential alternative protocols to OpenFlow for SDN, they fall short.
"OpenFlow is an essential component. There are alternatives that people are talking about to do SDN and some, of course, would be proprietary and others are based on other standards," Pitt says. "But they're not designed for [SDN]. We don't think they're as well-suited [as OpenFlow]."
