Tag Archives: Interop

Bringing 2017 To Everyone

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It’s time once again for my traditional New Year’s Day navel gazing. As per tradition with my blog, I’m not going to make prognostications about networking or IT in general. Either I’m going to wind up totally wrong or be totally right and no one will care. I rather enjoy the ride as we go along, so trying to guess what happens is kind of pointless.

Instead, I’m going to look at what I want to accomplish in the coming year. It gives me a chance to analyze what I’m doing and what I want to be working on. And it’s a whole lot easier than predicting that SDN is going to take everyone’s job or OpenFlow being dead again.

Write Like the Wind

My biggest goal for 2016 was to write more. And that I did. I worked in writing any time I could. I wrote about ONUG, SD-WAN, and other fun topics. I even wrote a small book! Finding time to work all the extra typing in to my Bruce Wayne job at Tech Field Day was a bit challenging here and there. And more than once I was publishing a blog post at the deadline. But all that writing did help me talk about new subjects in the industry and develop great ideas at the same time.

I also encouraged more people to write. I wanted to get people putting their thoughts down in a form that didn’t require listening or watching video. Writing is still very important and I think it’s a skill that more people should develop. My list of blogs to read every day grew in 2016 and I was very happy to see it. I hope that it continues well into 2017 as well.

King Of The Hill

2017 is going to be an exciting year for me and Tech Field Day. I ran Networking Field Day 12 as the host of the event for the first time. In the coming year, Stephen and I are going to focus on our topics areas even deeper. For me, that means immersing myself in networking and wireless technologies more than ever before. I’m going to be learning as much as I can about all the new things going on. It’s a part of the role of being the host and organizer for both Networking Field Day and Mobility Field Day coming up this year.

I’m also going to be visiting lots of other conferences. Cisco Live, Interop, and even Open Networking Summit are on my list this year. We’re going to be working closely with those shows to put on even more great Tech Field Day content. I love hearing the excitement from my friends in the industry when they learn that Tech Field Day is going to be present at a show like Cisco Live. It means that we’re reaching a great audience and giving them something that they are looking for.

We’re also going to be looking at new ideas and new things to do with our growing media presence with Gestalt IT. There should be some interesting things there on the horizon as we embrace the new way that media is used to communicate with readers and fans alike. Stay tuned there for all the excitement we’ll be bringing your way in 2017!

Tom’s Take

Analyzing a year’s worth of work helps one see progress and build toward even more goals in the coming year. I’m going to keep moving forward with the projects that excite me and challenge me to be a better representative for the networking community. Along the way I hope to learn more about what makes our technology exciting and useful. And share than knowledge with everyone I know in the best way I can. Thanks for being here with me. I hope 2017 is a great year for you as well!

HP Networking and the Software Defined Store

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HP has had a pretty good track record with SDN.  Even if it’s not very well-known.  HP has embraced OpenFlow on a good number of its Procurve switches.  Given the age of these devices, there’s a good chance you can find them laying around in labs or in retired network closets to test with.  But where is that going to lead in the long run?

HP Networking was kind enough to come to Interop New York and participate in a Tech Field Day roundtable.  It had been a while since I talked to their team.  I wanted to see how they were handling the battle being waged between OpenFlow proponents like NEC and Brocade, Cisco and their hardware focus, and VMware with NSX.  Jacob Rapp and Chris Young (@NetManChris) stepped up to the plate to talk about SDN and the vision on HP.

They cover a lot of ground in here.  Probably the most important piece to me is the SDN app store.

The press picked up on this quickly.  HP has an interesting idea here.  I should know.  I mentioned it in passing in an article I wrote a month ago.  The more I think about the app store model, the more I realize that many vendors are going to go down the road.  Just not in the way HP is thinking.

HP wants to curate content for enterprises.  They want to ensure that software works with their controller to be sure that there aren’t any hiccups in implementation.  Given their apparent distaste for open source efforts, it’s safe to say that their efforts will only benefit HP customers.  That’s not to say that those same programs won’t work on other controllers.  So long as they operate according to the guidelines laid down by the Open Networking Foundation, all should be good.

Show Me The Money

Where’s the value then?  That’s in positioning the apps in the store.  Yes, you’re going to have some developers come to HP and want to simple apps to put in the store.  Odds are better that you’re going to see more recognizable vendors coming to the HP SDN store.  People are more likely to buy software from a name they recognize, like TippingPoint or F5.  That means that those companies are going to want to have a prime spot in the store.  HP is going to make something from hosting those folks.

The real revenue doesn’t come from an SMB buying a load balancer once.  It comes from a company offering it as a service with a recurring fee.  The vendor gets a revenue stream. HP would be wise to work out a recurring fee as well.  It won’t be the juicy 30% cut that Apple enjoys from their walled garden, but anything would be great for the bottom line.  Vendors win from additional sales.  Customers win from having curated apps that work every time that are easy to purchase, install, and configure.  HP wins because everyone comes to them.

Fragmentation As A Service

Now that HP has jumped on the idea of an enterprise-focused SDN app store, I wonder which company will be the next to offer one?  I also worry that having multiple app stores won’t end up being cumbersome in the long run.  Small developers won’t like submitting their app to four or five different vendor-affiliated stores.  More likely they’ll resort to releasing code on their own rather than jump through hoops.  That will eventually lead to support fragmentation.  Fragmentation helps no one.

Tom’s Take

HP Networking did a great job showcasing what they’ve been doing in SDN.  It was also nice to hear about their announcements the day before they broke wide to the press.  I think HP is going to do well with OpenFlow on their devices.  Integrating OpenFlow visibility into their management tools is also going to do wonders for people worried about keeping up with all the confusing things that SDN can do to a traditional network.  The app store is a very intriguing concept that bears watching.  We can only hope that it ends up being a well-respect entry in a long line of easing customers into the greater SDN world.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

HP was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  In addition, they also provided the delegates a 1TB USB3 hard disk drive.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.

Cisco CMX – Marketing Magic? Or Big Brother?

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The first roundtable presenter at Interop New York was Cisco. Their Enterprise group always brings interesting technology to the table. This time, the one that caught my eye was the Connected Mobile Experience (CMX). CMX is a wireless mobility technology that allows a company to do some advanced marketing wizardry.

CMX uses your Cisco wireless network to monitor devices coming into the air space. They don’t necessarily have to connect to your wireless network for CMX to work. They just have to be beaconing for a network, which all devices do. CMX can then push a message to the device. This message can be a simple “thank you” for coming or something more advanced like a coupon or notification to download a store specific app. CMX can then store the information about that device, such as whether or not they joined the network, where they went, and how long they were there. This gives the company to pull some interesting statistics about their customer base. Even if they never hop on the wireless network.

I have to be honest here. This kind of technology gives me the bit of the creeps. I understand that user tracking is the hot new thing in retail. Stores want to know where you went, how long you stayed there, and whether or not you saw an advertisement or a featured item. They want to know your habits so as to better sell to you. The accumulation of that data over time allows for some patterns to emerge that can drive a retail operation’s decision making process.

A Thought Exercise

Think about an average person. We’ll call him Mike. Mike walks four blocks from his office to the subway station every day after work. He stops at the corner about halfway between to cross a street. On that street just happens to be a coffee shop using something like CMX. Mike has a brand new phone that uses wifi and bluetooth and Mike keeps them on all the time. CMX can detect when the device comes into range. It knows that Mike stays there for about 2 minutes but never joins the network. It then moves out of the WLAN area. The data cruncher for the store wants to drive new customers to the store. They analyze the data and find that lots of people stay in the area for a couple of minutes. They equate this to people stopping to decide if they want to have a cup of coffee from the shop. They decide to create a CMX coupon push notification that pops up after one minute on devices that have been seen in the database for the last month. Mike will see a coupon for $1 off a cup of coffee the next time he waits for the light in front of the coffee shop.

That kind of reach is crazy. I keep thinking back to the scenes in Minority Report where the eye scanners would detect you looking at an advertisement and then target a specific ad based on your retina scan. You may say that’s science fiction. But with products like CMX, I can build a pretty complete profile of your behavior even if I don’t have a retina scan. Correlating information provides a clear picture of who you are without any real identity information. Knowing that someone likes to spend their time in the supermarket in the snack aisles and frozen food aisles and less time in the infants section says a lot. Knowing the route a given device takes through the store can help designers place high volume items in the back and force shoppers to take longer routes past featured items.

Tom’s Take

I’m not saying that CMX is a bad product. It’s providing functionality that can be of great use to retail companies. But, just like VHS recorders and Bittorrent, good ideas can often be used to facilitate things that aren’t as noble. I suggested to the CMX developers that they could implement some kind of “opt out” message that popped up if I hadn’t joined the wireless network in a certain period of time. I look at that as a way of saying to shoppers “We know you aren’t going to join. Press the button and we’ll wipe our your device info.” It puts people at ease to know they aren’t being tracked. Even just showing them what you’re collecting is a good start. With the future of advertising and marketing focusing on instant delivery and data gathering for better targeting, I think the products like CMX will be powerful additions. But, great power requires even greater responsibility.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Cisco was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.