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 Channel Futures

Open Source


Are Cisco and Red Hat Getting Cozy?

  • Written by The VAR Guy 1
  • June 11, 2008

When Red Hat kicks off its big customer summit June 18 in Boston, the open source giant will bring along a rather large — and surprising — date: Cisco Systems Inc. Why does Cisco plan to hang out at one of the open source industry’s largest events? The VAR Guy has a few hunches.

Over the past year or so, Cisco has begun a quiet metamorphosis. During meetings with The VAR Guy in 2006, Cisco could barely utter the term “open source,” and company insiders weren’t familiar with industry players like Canonical, SugarCRM or MySQL (since acquired by Sun Microsystems).

But by mid-2007, The VAR Guy noticed some small but significant changes. During a media gathering in Dublin, Ireland, Cisco managers actually uttered the “open source” term, and they spoke a bit about their efforts to get open source (and closed source) application developers aboard the unified communications bandwagon.

Good News, Bad News

The VAR Guy isn’t suggesting that Cisco is ready to start open sourcing all of its software projects. But the networking company is starting to realize that open source is both a blessing and a burden.

On the upside, Cisco can leverage open source partners to fend off Microsoft’s unified communication efforts. We all know that application developers are the key to winning platform wars. And in Cisco’s mind, the next big platform is unified communications.

Now, for the challenge: Open source also threatens Cisco in some ways, particularly at the low end of the market where companies like Digium, Untangle and others are promoting open source networking, IP PBX and security solutions.

Open source won’t threaten to destroy Cisco anytime soon, but Cisco isn’t waiting around to see how the competitive landscape evolves.

Welcome to Red Hat Summit

Instead, Cisco is attending — and even sponsoring — events like Red Hat Summit.

During the summit, Cisco is expected to describe how its products complement Red Hat’s middleware. But The VAR Guy thinks Cisco will spend considerable time listening to attendees — rather than pitching products.

Microsoft spent the 1990s ignoring and dismissing competitive threats from Linux. Apparently, Cisco is determined to avoid that mistake in the modern age of Web 2.0 and open applications.

Ignoring open source would mean dismissing dozens of application companies — and thousands of independent programmers — who can add value to Cisco’s unified communications strategy.


Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Networking Open Source

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7 comments

  1. Avatar Frankie Says June 11, 2008 @ 5:28 pm
    Reply

    I think this has more to do with open source networking and less to do with unified open source applications. Most ISVs, open or closed source, aren’t writing unified applications yet.

  2. Joe Joe June 11, 2008 @ 8:37 pm
    Reply

    “2006, Cisco could barely utter the term “open source,” and company insiders weren’t familiar with industry players like Canonical, SugarCRM or MySQL”

    I would expect not. Canonical was barely a blip in 2006. Canonical is still a _tiny_ player in the Open Source are, regardless of their relentless marketing machine. And what would SugarCRM have to do with Ciscos’ primary business? Or a database? Maybe if you where mentioning python-twisted, Cacti, Nagios, nmap or a host of other applications that might have something to do with their core business they would reacted differently.

    Cisco has been working with F/LOSS developers for years – they are now just publicizing the fact.

  3. Avatar The VAR Guy June 11, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
    Reply

    Joe: The VAR Guy understands your points, but there were key “silos” of expertise in Cisco. Sure, some Cisco insiders knew about free and open source software. But a great many people in Cisco marketing didn’t understand how the worlds of networking, open source and applications would converge two years ago.

    Here we are in 2008, and everyone is marching toward unified communications — CRM, databases and other apps tied to unified call centers, etc.

  4. Avatar From the Admin Corner June 12, 2008 @ 1:35 am
    Reply

    An other explanation: chance are that all sorts of System and Network Admins would attend such conf therefore it would be an other mean to reach one of their core audience.

  5. Avatar Dim June 12, 2008 @ 11:05 am
    Reply

    Quoting from here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/mrg.html

    “As a working group member of AMQP, Cisco has been collaborating with Red Hat for over 18 months on low-latency optimization of AMQP and MRG Messaging open middleware protocols across InfiniBand compute fabrics,” said Bill Erdman, marketing director, Data Center Technology Group at Cisco. “Through this collaboration with Red Hat we are insuring that MRG is fully interoperable and offers enhanced services, including quality of service, manageability and increased delivery reliability.”

  6. Avatar The VAR Guy June 12, 2008 @ 12:07 pm
    Reply

    Dim @5: Great to hear, but many people in CSCO are only now getting a feel for open source. The VAR Guy has covered CSCO since 1992… Linux got its start in the early 1990s. Red Hat went public in 1999… Now, CSCO is finally waking up to the world of open source. It’s one thing to “work” with red hat in a working group, it’s quite another for CSCO to open its wallet and sponsor a major Red Hat event. Correction: The major Red Hat event of the year. Smart move on CSCO’s part, The VAR Guy believes.

  7. Avatar Al June 12, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
    Reply

    Having worked at Cisco for eight years previously, Cisco certainly used Linux for many different product lines typically on management platforms, SAN products or Wireless controllers. There is a lot of ‘siloed’ expertise as someone pointed out earlier.

    I think the point that isn’t being brought up is that Cisco now views Microsoft as its #1 threat in unified communications and other areas. I think they are just solidly placing themselves on the other side to be honest. They see a cost/competitive advantage and want to help set the “other” standard.

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