Then the other branch is going to be folks who just say, "Look, I see the functionality. I love it. I want all that functionality. But I also want one throat to choke. I want somebody to wrap it all up as a solution, and I want to buy this all from one brand." I don't think we're just talking about networking. When we look at this model, what they buy may actually include computers as well. It may actually include storage. I kind of think that's the long-term trend here.
So realistically I think we're going to see two branches, and one branch fits the exact market dynamics that you're talking about. The other branch says, "Hey, I want to buy a solution that's entirely in a box, validated," and I think there's going to be a lot of margin there.
InformationWeek: So hardware vendors shouldn’t worry about the “white box” effect?
Forster: I think they need to worry about it. They can react it in one of two ways: You can either try to play defense, or you can try to play offense. I'm absolutely offense. I'm coming out and thinking really hard and pushing engineering teams to come out with innovative features that just make networks work better for customers, make them do more and work better. If you're really pushing hard in that direction, then I don't think anybody has anything to fear. If you play defense, then you should be really worried. And I don't think that's new. That to me is a very old story that we're seeing playing out again here.
InformationWeek: Let’s talk about the Open Networking Foundation. Traditional standards groups like the ITF and IEEE are open--customers and enterprises can go to the meetings and participate, but most of the contributors are vendors, because vendors have a vested interest in making standards work. Is the ONF going to bring the customer organization back into the standards process?
Forster: Yes. I think we touched on this a tiny bit in our last conversation. The networking industry has had a lot of competitors to ITF. I think of the ATM Forum as being one of the more successful ones because it did involve customers up front. ITF had customers at the very, very early days--at a very different period in history when there was way less money involved! I think that ONF has a wonderful opportunity at longevity. I think to do that they need to keep the customer voice very strong and very representative of the entire customer base of OpenFlow. When I speak from the vendor side, if the voice of the customer--the voice of my customer--is very, very strong on that body, then we're going to pay attention. It's when they lose that customer voice that we just have less and less incentive to follow.
InformationWeek: So for enterprise IT pros, how will your company in particular and OpenFlow in general make their lives better?
Forster: For OpenFlow, we have this sense of, hey, take three ports from here, two ports from here, five ports from over here, basically all these switch ports from all across a very complex network. An architect would come through and pull these ports and carefully connect them. But then, they can wrap them up and delegate them out to an administrator who sees this as just one switch. And that's where the name of the company comes from, because it could be 1,000 ports from here, these 25 ports, and suddenly we have a 1,025-port switch. So for us, it's this sort of two-view thing where we have, OK, one person who sort of knows the physical topology and constructs it very carefully, and then the other who, to be honest, just sees the network as one big switch. And that, I think, has the opportunity to really make life a lot easier.
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