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Cisco Boss Makes Contradictory Assumptions About Virtualization: Page 3 of 3

I don't know what will be the specific benefit that makes virtual enterprise networking take off. Judging from the behavior of companies big and small during the past five years, however, I'm pretty confident there will be a killer function or two and that virtualized big-time networking will take off, whether as SDN or some other acronym.

I'm also reasonably confident that Chambers and Cisco will either back down or add some flexibility to Chambers' apparent belief that networking can't happen without networking hardware--and that networking hardware isn't worthwhile unless it's from Cisco.

It's a hard line, one that punishes customers for buying from Cisco and for having plans for their networks that may not mesh with behavior that will optimize Cisco's financial future.

Chambers emotes warm fuzzies while promising customers that Cisco will respond to as great a degree as possible to their individual concerns. The fuzzies fly so thick it's hard to credit them as sincere.

But, as in the Cisco Connect cloud fiasco, he does change his mind and, more importantly, change the behavior of Cisco as well.

It's possible that, by the time the installed base of SDN grows from 2% to something formidable, Chambers and Cisco will be fully on board with the idea that hardware is simply hardware and that software is what makes it flexible, responsive and dynamic.

It's also possible HP and Cisco will stick with proprietary, mutually exclusive approaches to SDN and get so pissy about the rivalry that neither is willing to open a crack that would make it easier for customers to breathe.

What's certain is that, in the long run, hardware is simply hardware. Neither network managers nor end users pay Cisco to truck over yet another big box to sit in a data center, sucking up power and blowing off heat.

Customers pay IT vendors for new capabilities, new functions, for the flexibility to create, change or expand their own systems according to their own needs. They don't pay for pretty boxes with Cisco's logo painted on like a VoIP phone product placement in a prime-time drama.

Chambers and Cisco will figure that out quickly enough and figure out how to add more of the unique benefits of a combined hardware/software Cisco solution into the software alone.

They'll figure it out, or customers will go elsewhere to buy software they can use to run networks without having to worry about where the hardware came from, whose name is on the side or what John Chambers thinks of the way their networks run.

That's their business, thank you and, whenever possible, it's one they'll handle without being forced to dress a certain way, act differently or buy all their hardware from one place simply because the vendor's philosophy and financial results depend more on vendor lock-in than customer satisfaction.