Have you ever taken the opportunity to think about something from a completely different perspective? Or seen someone experience something you have seen through new eyes? It’s not easy for sure. But it is a very enlightening experience that can help you understand why people sometimes see things entirely differently even when presented with the same information.

Overcast Networking

The first time I saw this in action was with Aviatrix Systems. I first got to see them at Cisco Live 2018. They did a 1-hour presentation about their solution and gave everyone an overview of what it could do. For the networking people in the room it was pretty straightforward. Aviatrix did a lot of the things that networking should do. It was just in the cloud instead of in a data center. It’s not that Aviatrix wasn’t impressive. It’s the networking people have a very clear idea of what a networking platform should do.

Fast forward two months to Cloud Field Day 4. Aviatrix presents again, only this time to a group of cloud professionals. The message was a little more refined from their first presentation. They included some different topics to appeal more to a cloud audience, such as AWS encryption or egress security. The reception from the delegates was the differencue between night and day. Rather than just be satisfied with the message that Aviatrix put forward, the Cloud Field Day delegates were completely blown away! They loved everything that Aviatrix had to say. They loved the way that Aviatrix approached a problem they had seen and couldn’t quite understand. How to extend networking into the cloud and take control of it.

Did Aviatrix do something different? Why was the reaction between the two groups so stark? How did it happen this way? I think it is in part because networking people talk to a networking company and see networking. They find the things they expect to find and don’t look any deeper. But when the same company presents to an audience that doesn’t have networking on the brain for the entirety of their career it’s something entirely different. While a networking audience may understand the technology a cloud audience may understand how to make it work better for their needs because they can see the advantages. Perspective matters in this case because people exposed to new ideas find ways to make them work in ways that can only be seen with fresh eyes.

Letting Go of Wires

The second time I saw an example of perspective at play was at Mobility Field Day 3 with Arista Networks. Arista is a powerhouse in the data center networking space. They have gone up against Cisco and taken them head-to-head in a lot of deals. They have been gaining marketshare from Cisco in a narrow range of products focused on the data center. But they’re also now moving into campus switching as well as wireless with the acquisition of Mojo Networks.

When Arista stepped up to present at Mobility Field Day 3, the audience wasn’t a group of networking people that wanted to hear about CloudVision or 400GbE or even EOS. The audience of wireless and mobility professionals wanted to hear how Arista is going to integrate the Mojo product line into their existing infrastructure. The audience was waiting for a message that everything would work together and the way forward would be clear. I don’t know that they heard that message, but it wasn’t because of anything that Arista did on purpose.

Arista is very much trying to understand how they’re going to integrate Mojo Networks into what they do. They’re also very focused on the management and control plane of the access points. These are solved problems in the wireless world right now. When you talk to a wireless professional about centralized management of the device or a survivable control plane that can keep running if the management system is offline they’ll probably laugh. They’ve been able to experience this for the past several years so far. They know what SDN should look like because it’s the way that CAPWAP controllers have always operated. Wireless pros can tell you the flaws behind backhauling all your traffic through a controller and why there are much better options to keep from overwhelming the device.

Wireless pros have a different perspective from networking people right now. Things that networking pros are just now learning about are the past to wireless people. Wireless pros are focused more on the radio side of the equation than the routing and switching side. That perspective gives the wireless crowd a very narrow focus on solving some very hard problems but it does make them miss the point that their expertise can be invaluable to helping both networking pros and networking companies see how to take the best elements of wireless networking control mechanisms and implement them in such a way as to benefit everyone.

Tom’s Take

For me, the difficulty in seeing things differently doesn’t come from having an open mind. Instead, it comes from the fact that most people don’t have a conception of anything outside their frame of reference. We can’t really comprehend things we can’t conceive of. What you need to do to really understand what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes is have someone show you what it looks like to be in them. Observe people learning something for the first time. Or see how they react to a topic you know well. Odds are good you might just find that you will know it better because they helped you understand it better.