Cisco ACI: Proceed At Your Peril

Cisco's recently announced ACI strategy is going to be tough to sell to customers. It's confusing and only one of several Cisco SDN strategies, and it doesn't ship until mid-2014 at the earliest. In the meantime, other SDN vendors are shipping real products and customers are using them. The challenges Cisco ACI has to overcome, combined with the company's sad history of failed software projects, will make many customers think twice.

In a previous article, I looked at the features and functions of Cisco ACI, and explained all the benefits that ACI brings to the table. This article examines the challenges and weakness in the Cisco's ACI SDN strategy.

A few weeks have passed since ACI's launch, and I've had time to take a more critical look at the details. The most interesting comment I've heard was that ACI is "entirely predictable and lacks leadership." 

Read the rest of this article on Network Computing.