Cisco Insieme: It'll Do Stuff, But We Won't Tell You

Lots of people in the tech industry are curious about Insieme, a Cisco-backed venture about which few details are known, though many observers assume Insieme is doing something related to SDN. Today, Cisco failed to provide any significant new information during an Insieme Webcast at Cisco Live in Orlando.

Soni Jiandani, Senior VP of Insieme Networks, spoke in broad terms about the company and its forthcoming products: broad terms like “next generation” “paradigm shift” and “tight integration.” Also, silos. Insieme will make silos go away.

Insieme seems to also want to make VMware/Nicira go away, because Jiandani noted that network virtualization is a “first-generation” technology.

Basically, the presentation offered a vision in in which Insieme would do some stuff, and that stuff would be awesome, and would magically fix all the problems in your data center. With stuff like that, who needs actual information?

A couple of details did slip through. Insieme will offer both hardware and software, and the hardware will be ASIC-based, though the company aims to cover its bases by promising to support both merchant and custom silicon.

Jiandani also noted that at the end of the year, Insieme would deliver 40Gig optical transceivers that would let Cisco customers use their existing 10Gig cables.

All in all, however, it was frustratingly information-free, especially compared to the follow-on presentation about Cisco’s new Dynamic Fabric Automation and Nexus 7700 switch, which was chock-full of details.

Jiandani promised that more information on Insieme and its products would come at the end of the year. I think both Cisco and Insieme missed an opportunity to get people excited about what’s coming. Instead, they offered up a marketing-drenched vision full of empty calories and generic promises.