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Big Vendor Head Shuffles at the SDN Curling Rink

18th October 2012 by 1 Comment

Curling is a sport that involves people tossing a rock down an ice rink and then using brooms to guide it’s path. That’s a pretty apt description for employer changes in the SDN/OpenFlow space in the last few months.

David Ward was leading the SDN portfolio at Juniper. Rumour has it that John Chambers saw a video of his presentation at ONF 2011 and told staffers to do whatever it takes to get him back to Cisco. Several large numbers later, David Ward is now at Cisco leading the Programmable Networking push into Service Providers.

David Meyers who was leading the Cisco SDN push has left Cisco for Brocade in todays announcement from Brocade. This is a significant advance for Brocade’s SDN efforts since he has a long history in the Service Provider space and heavily involved with ONF from the earliest day.

Still. Although vendors can’t find a use case for SDN we still need lots of executives to find them.

Discussion of Brocade Software Defined Networking Use Cases at Network Field Day 4.

 

 

David Ward, then at Juniper – speaking in Packet Pushers OpenFlow Symposium in Oct 2011.

David Ward of Juniper at OpenFlow Symposium from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

David Meyer, then at Cisco, speaking in Packet Pushers OpenFlow Symposium in Oct 2011.

David Meyer of Cisco at OpenFlow Symposium from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • returnofthemus

    Put simply Dave Ward brilliant orator, unfortunately his credibility was shot to pieces when he decided to jump ship peddling exactly the same FUD, for me his appointment confirmed all suspicions that Cisco very much view OF as a threat. For his sake I sincerely do hope hes being paid extremely well for his efforts as I fear he’ll be battling against the tide on this one, especially in the SP space where cost reduction and simplification is paramount, his former employer have hugely abandoned its over ambitious CDN plans. It also shows how devoid of ideas Cisco were in dealing with this perceived threat.
    As for Dave Meyer, talk about foot-in-mouth, I quote ” the boxes in the network, they’re just forwarding planes now”, on more than on ocassion, this can’t have been going down too well back at Tasman Drive, HQ (Dave Ward to the rescue). What now appears to be obvious is that hierarchy were refusing to listen, OnePk is no compromise and Campus Network slicing is not a substitute or excuse to OF-enable your hardware, certainly no doubts about Mr Meyer’s sincerity!