Tag Archive for CSCO

| March 10, 2018
Comments Off on Follow the Open Source Money

Follow the Open Source Money

 Matt Asay at Infoworld recently pointed out some interesting data on who really contributes to open source. Wikipedia, the most well-known open-source project, defines open-source software as software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities include individual programmers as well as large companies.

Open sourceAdobe developer Fil Maj used the GitHub REST API to pull public profile information from GitHub users. The REST API is a low-bandwidth protocol used on the internet that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. Using the API, Mr. Maj collected the company field from all 2,060,011 GitHub user profiles who were active in 2017 (“active” meaning ten or more commits to public projects). Using that data, Mr. Maj was able to pull the total number of corporate contributors to GitHub, with results that might surprise you.

Here are the ranking of GitHub contributors, with their total number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub:

RankCompanyEmployees Contributing
1Microsoft4,550
2Google2,267
3Red Hat2,027
4IBM1,813
5Intel1,314
6Amazon.com881
7SAP747
8ThoughtWorks739
9Alibaba694
10GitHub676
11Facebook619
12Tencent605
13Pivotal591
14EPAM Systems585
15Baidu584
16Mozilla469
17Oracle455
18Unity Technologies414
19Uber388
20Yandex351
21Shopify345
22LinkedIn343
23Suse325
24ESRI324
25Apple292
26Salesforce.com291
27VMware271
28Adobe Systems270
29Andela259
30Cisco Systems233

The author points out, this is not a perfect measure, but it is a much richer, more accurate data set for figuring out total contributors for any company. Even with that caveat in mind, we end up with many more corporate open source contributors than previous data suggested.

Microsoft’s contributions to open source

Microsoft's contributions to open sourceThe new data shows Microsoft (MSFT) is the number 1 open source contributor. Redmond has twice the number of contributors compared to its next nearest competitor. Remember Steve Ballmer‘s developers! developers! developers! meltdown?  For those of us that were around when Mr. Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO called open source as a “cancer” and “anti-American,” this is a remarkable change of heart for MSFT.

Red Hat

Red Hat (RHT) Mr. Maj’s data puts the open source leader among the top contributors. Red Hat has dramatically fewer engineers on its payroll than Google (GOOG) or Microsoft. As such, it’s doubly impressive that Red Hat would place so highly. Pretty much every engineer in the company works on open-source projects.

Amazon

 

Amazon logoAmazon (AMZN) Often considered an open source ne’er-do-well, Amazon comes in at No. 6 in the rankings. AMZN has nearly 900 open source contributors on staff. The article points out that Amazon has perhaps not publicly led the open source effort in the same way as Google and Microsoft have, but it remains a strong contributor to the projects that feed its developer community.

China is a net consumer of open source

Chinese companies like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, which have long been perceived to be net consumers of open source, actually contribute quite a bit according to the new data.

Legacy firms

Legacy firms like Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), Adobe (ADBE), and Cisco (CSCO) rank among the top 30 open source contributors reports InfoWorld.

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Color me suspicious, but have these firms really embraced open source. Have they just adapted their business model to usurp elements of open source to lay their proprietary code on top of it? This saves them the bother of writing new code and yet they can charge proprietary costs for software where they have reduced their development costs.

Tom Brady hanging high fiveAfter all, numbers don’t lie. Stats say that in 2014, half of the companies said they use open source in their product. Just one year later, the number grew to 78%. Consequently, as long as open source continues to enjoy its place in the sun, we should expect the Microsoft-open source bromance to continue.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| February 24, 2018
Comments Off on Switch Sales Stalled

Switch Sales Stalled

Switch Sales StalledThe stats for sales of network switches are in for Q4 2017. Only one of the top 5 networking vendors was able to squeeze out a small gain in switch sales. The data comes from New York-based NPD. NPD tracks monthly network switch sales data from the sales channel, distributors, and resellers in North America.

The article on CRN notes that the total number of switches sold through the channel in the quarter was 514,095. The number is up slightly from 510,822 in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to NPD. Here are the five vendors that sold the most switches through the channel in the fourth quarter, according to NPD.

D-Link Systems

D-Link logoTaiwan-based D-Link Systems (2332:TT) sold 25,259 switches during the fourth quarter, according to NPD statistics. That total kept the company steady with the same period in 2016 when it sold 25,277. D-Link did not have a switch model among the top 10-selling units during the quarter. Its market share was unchanged at 4.9%, CRN said.

TP-Link switch sales

According to NPD’s data, of all the five best-selling switch brands, TP-Link saw the steepest decline during this period. The company based in Shenzhen, China sold 26,023 switches in Q4 ’17 compared with 29,798 in Q4 ’16. That’s a 12.7 percent year-over-year decrease. There is one bright spot for the firm, the article reports that the company’s TLSF1005D Ethernet switch was the third-best-selling unit during the quarter. But that was not enough to prevent a market share decline from 5.8 percent in 2016 to 5.1 percent in 2017.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise switch sales

HPE LogoThe news from NDP is not good for former networking giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) either. The Palo Alto, CA-based firm saw a 1.8 percent decline in switches sold from 55,923 in Q4 ’16 to 54,941 switches in Q4 ’17. The quarter’s total was enough for a 10.7 percent market share, down slightly from the year-ago period. No HPE switch models were among the top 10 for the quarter, according to NPD.

Netgear sales

CRN reports that sales also slipped for Netgear. The number 2 switch company saw its market share dip from 18.3% to 17.9% year over year. The California-based firm sold 92,274 switches through the channel in the fourth quarter, down slightly from the 93,531 it sold in the same period a year ago, NPD said. Netgear had four switches in the top 10-best-selling switches during the quarter, including the top two models, the FS105 and GS105NA five-port models.

Cisco switch sales

Cisco (CSCO) was able to hold on to the #1 switch vendor position according to NDP. It sold 225,051 units during the period, a 5.7 percent increase that boosted the company’s market share to 43.8 percent from 41.7 a year earlier. Six of the top 10 best-selling switches in the quarter were Cisco Catalyst‘s led by the WS-C2960X 24– and 48-port models.

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What happened to the network switch market? It’s still reeling from the 2007/08 recession and the Wi-Fi takeoff. Other than the Cisco switches, most of the top switch models sold were unmanaged, desktop switches limited to 100 Mbps uplinks. These types of switches make it OK to randomly add an unauthorized switch at the desktop and POOF there does your data. These desktop switches with their limited feature set don’t include Spanning Tree, so users can create a network loop and take down the whole network segment.

Not much to shout about.

Where are the vendors? Brocade? Extreme? Juniper? Dell? I am old enough to remember when switch manufacturers had a #2 strategy. 3Com, Lucent, Bay/Nortel all came into my office and said they wanted to #2 – now they are gone.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 20, 2017
Comments Off on Whats Up With Cisco?

Whats Up With Cisco?

Whats Up With Cisco?What is up with Cisco? Their fiscal results for 2017 Q3 showed revenue of $11.9 billion, a 1% decline in revenue, compared to last year. This is the 6th consecutive down quarter. The networking goliath also issued downward guidance for 2017 Q4. They estimated a revenue declines of 4-6% year-over-year.

Cisco logoOn the earnings call, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins blamed several factors for the lower guidance. He cited:

  • “A pretty significant stall right now” in the U.S. federal public sector.
  • Service provider revenues were down in Mexico.
  • United Kingdom business is being dampened by currency issues.
  • Middle East, there is “pressure… relative to oil prices.”

Cisco layoffs

Then there are the layoffs. Cisco buried the announcement in a footnote in the company’s SEC 8-K report that 1,100 more layoffs are coming. That is on top of the 5,500 announced in August 2016.

In May 2017, we extended the restructuring plan to include an additional 1,100 employees with $150 million of estimated additional pretax charges.

Cisco layoffs

According to SDXCentral, the Cisco CEO stressed several times on the earnings call, that the company is transitioning to more software and subscription-based business. He declared,

I am pleased with the progress we are making on the multi-year transformation of our business.

These weak financial results and the move to a subscription-based business have fed speculation about the future Cisco business model. TechTarget speculates that Cisco may go so far as to separate the Network Operating System (NOS) from the hardware. They contend the move would be a dramatic departure from Cisco’s traditional business model of bundling high-margin hardware with its NOS. The author believes that market trends will likely force the vendor to release an open NOS.

Open NOS

Cisco 3750 switchTechTarget cites reports from The Information that a hardware-independent NOS called Lindt is coming. Reportedly Lindt will run on a white box powered by merchant silicon. According to the article, a number of market trends are driving the move to a hardware-independent NOS.

The first market trend forcing Cisco’s hand is the company’s declining dominance of the Ethernet switch market. Since 2011, the company’s share has dropped from 75% to less than 60% last year, according to the financial research site Trefis. The decline is important to Cisco’s bottom line. Switches accounted for 40% of Cisco’s product sales in 2016, 30% of net revenues, and 20% of the company’s $162 billion valuation.

Infrastructure as a ServiceCisco’s weakening performance in switching is tied to the second market trend forcing Cisco to release a hardware-independent NOS. Its customers are turning to public cloud providers, Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, and IBM (IBM) SoftLayer, for their IT infrastructure. The more enterprises subscribe to infrastructure as a service, the less networking gear they need in their data centers.

Cloud computing

The shift to cloud providers is found in the latest numbers from Synergy Research Group. Revenue from public cloud infrastructure services is growing at almost 50% a year. In the fourth quarter of last year, revenues topped $7 billion.

cloud providers are building open networking hardware and softwareThe third market trend forcing Cisco to a hardware-independent NOS is enterprises that were Cisco’s largest customers are now competitors. Enterprises and cloud providers are building open networking hardware and software to replace inflexible proprietary systems that lock them in. Those companies include large financial institutions, like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity Investments. As well as communication service providers, AT&T (T), Deutsche Telekom, and Verizon (VZ).

The technology shift is driving an enormous amount of spending on IT infrastructure. Worldwide spending on public and private cloud environments will increase 15% this year from 2016 to $42 billion, according to IDC. Meanwhile, spending in Cisco’s core market of traditional infrastructure for non-cloud data centers will fall by 5%.

White boxes

Arista NetworksWhile Cisco is ignoring the trend away from proprietary hardware, the article says Cisco’s rivals are embracing it. Juniper (JNPR) and Arista (ANET) have released versions of their NOS for white boxes favored by cloud providers and large enterprises. Both companies reported year-to-year revenue growth in switching last year. Even Cisco’s patent lawsuit against upstart Arista was set back by the courts.

Rohit Mehra, an analyst at IDC hypothesized that Cisco’s resistance to change is likely due to fear that giving customers other hardware options would accelerate declining sales in switching. “There would be potentially some risk of cannibalization in the enterprise space,” he added.

Cisco insists its customers are not interested in buying networking software that’s separate from the underlying switch. The Cisco spokesperson told TechTarget:

TCisco insists its customers are not interestedhe vast majority of our customers see tremendous value in the power and efficiency of Cisco’s integrated network platforms, and the tight integration of hardware and software will continue to be the basis of the networking solutions we offer our customers

TechTarget adds that Cisco doesn’t say the article is wrong. Instead, the company falls back on a corporate cliché for refusing to discuss a media report. “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” a Cisco spokesperson said.

The networking market is evolving away from the hardware that Cisco depends on for much of its valuation. Cisco will resist changing its market approach for as long as possible. But in the end, the company will have to become a part of the trend with an open NOS capable of running on whatever hardware the customer chooses.

Cisco’s own problems

Rather than change its model for selling networking gear, Cisco has spent billions of dollars on acquisitions over the last few years to create software and subscription-based businesses in security and analytics. But Cisco’s software push has yet to pay off with 5 conservative down quarters.

Finally, Cisco just recently patched a flaw in IOS software that affected more than 300 models of its switches. Despite issuing an advisory on March 17, Cisco did not release the patch for this vulnerability until May 8, 2017. The Cisco vulnerability was part of the Vault 7 WikiLeaks dump of alleged CIA hacking tools.

Alleged CIA hacking toolsThe vulnerability, rated a critical 9.8 out of 10 by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, is in the Cluster Management Protocol, or CMP. could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to reload devices or execute code with elevated privileges. This vulnerability can be exploited during Telnet session negotiation over either IPv4 or IPv6.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 26, 2017
Comments Off on Avaya Goes Chapter 11

Avaya Goes Chapter 11

-Updated- 03-07-17 As predicted Avaya spun off its networking business. The lucky winner is Extreme. The presser from Extreme is here.

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Avaya Goes Chapter 11In one of the worst-kept secrets in tech, Avaya has finally declared bankruptcy. The Santa Clara, CA-based communications company filed for chapter 11 protection on January 19th, 2017 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Reports are that Avaya faced an end of January deadline to reach agreements with creditors to address its $6.3 billion debt or potentially default.

Avaya logoThe company’s presser announcing the bankruptcy characterizes the decision to seek Chapter 11 as a necessary re-do on deals made a decade ago. The company was spun off from Lucent, a former AT&T unit, in 2000. Avaya went private in 2007 when private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group took over the firm for $8.2 billion. Avaya was set up as a leveraged buyout – loaded with debt. At the time the new owners said going private would help Avaya to accelerate product development. In 2009 Avaya scooped up the remnants of Nortel for $900m.

The Nortel acquisition added Ethernet switching and VoIP to Avaya’s portfolio. While the move added needed hardware to the Avaya portfolio the rest of the tech world started the shift towards software-as-a-service and the cloud. Avaya was not able to digest Nortel while taking on Cisco, Microsoft, and the cloud at the same time.

$6.3 billion debtAvaya was both late with VoIP and Unified Communications. Neither Microsoft nor Cisco were competitors in the TDM/PBX era. Cisco joined the race with VoIP and Microsoft then came along with Unified Communications. Both have tremendous enterprise penetration and brand recognition.

The pressure forced Avaya to consider selling its crown jewel, its contact center products to Genesys in 2016, in the hope it would raise some cash. When the deal with Genesys fell through, Avaya decided to file for bankruptcy. Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy said in a statement, “…chapter 11 is the best path forward at this time.”

In order to keep the lights on during the reorganization, the company has secured a $725 million loan underwritten by Citibank.

As part of its debt load, Avaya owes its pensioners $1.7 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. According to NoJitter Avaya will honor it obligations to maintain and continue the pension (as did GM in its reorganization).

Chapter 11 only impacts Avaya’s United States operations. In the rest of the world, the company is moving to assure customers and stakeholders that it’s business as usual.

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My experience is that the Avaya IP Office product is way over-priced, even in a bid environment. Why would anyone buy an Avaya Ethernet switch or access point when you can get a Cisco or an HP?

So what is to become of Avaya? One likely outcome is that all of the business units will be sold off to satisfy the creditors. The only thing left of Avaya will be a service organization to care for the huge installed base of orphaned Nortel and Avaya systems.

I know people are already getting calls from Cisco about replacing Avaya.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| July 23, 2016
Comments Off on Ethernet Marches On

Ethernet Marches On

Ethernet Marches OnIt has been a while since we talked about networking on the Bach Seat. So it is time to get back to my roots. Ethernet continues to dominate the world. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3 Ethernet Working Group, the group responsible for the Ethernet standard, recently ratified 4 new Ethernet-related standards. The committee approved IEEE 802.3bp, IEEE 802.3bq, IEEE 802.3br, and IEEE 802.3by.

IEEE 802.3br has implications for IoT and connected cars. This new standard addresses the needs of industrial control system manufacturers and the automotive market by specifying a pre-emption methodology for time-sensitive traffic. IEEE 802.3bp addresses how Ethernet operates in harsh environments found in automotive and industrial applications.

The 2 more interesting new standards to networkers are IEEE 802.3bq and IEEE 802.3by. These standards help define how 25 GB and 40 GB Ethernet will work and more importantly how products from multiple vendors should interoperate in the data center. For a summary of the rationale for the new standard here is the IEEE presentation  (PDF).

Data c enterIEEE 802.3bq, “Standard for Ethernet Amendment: Physical Layer and Management Parameters for 25 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s Operation, Types 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T“, opens the door to higher-speed 25 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s twisted pair solutions with auto-negotiation capabilities and Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) support for data center applications.

IEEE 802.3by, “Standard for Ethernet Amendment: Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers, and Management Parameters for 25 Gb/s Operation”, introduces cost-optimized 25 Gb/s PHY specifications for single-lane server and switch interconnects for data centers.

Siemon’s Standards Informant explains that 25GBASE-T will be backward-compatible with existing BASE T technology and both 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T are planned for operation over TIA category 8 cabling. The deployment opportunity for 25GBASE-T is aligned with 40GBASE-T and defined as the same 2-connector, 30-meter reach topology supporting data center edge connections (i.e., switch to server connections in row-based structured cabling or top of rack configurations).

The standard’s ratification comes shortly after the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) approved its standard specifications for Category 8 cabling, the twisted-pair type designed to support 25GBase-T and 40GBase-T.

Though 25 Gigabit Ethernet is only now becoming an official standard, Enterprise Networking Planet reports that multiple vendors already have technologies in the market. Among the early adopter of 25 GbE is Broadcom (AVGO) which announced back in 2014 that its StrataXGS Tomahawk silicon would support 25 GbE. In 2015, Arista (ANET) announced its lineup of 25 GbE switches. Cisco (CSCO) is also embedding 25 GbE support in some of its switches including the Nexus 9516 switch.

That is where 25-Gb/s Ethernet comes in. It uses the same LC fiber cables and the SFP28 transceiver modules are compatible with standard SFP+ modules. This means that data-center operators can upgrade from 10 GbE to 25 GbE using the existing installed optical cabling and get a 2.5X increase in performance.

The IEEE 25GbE standard seems to have come out of nowhere, (especially considering the L O N G D R A W N O U T 8 0 2 . 1 1 n process but the technology actually came into being as the natural single-lane version of the IEEE 802.3ba 100-Gb/s Ethernet standard. The 100-Gb/s Ethernet standard uses four separate 25-Gb/s lanes running in parallel, so defining a single lane makes it a straightforward and natural subset of the 100-Gb/s standard.

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IEthernetEEE P802.3by and P802.3bq were initially targeted for server connections in mega data centers like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. In the next 5 years, 25G will be the next mainstream server upgrade from 10G, even for smaller data centers. SMB data centers will be facing a connectivity crisis in the future as the pace of virtualization increases.

According to IDC, the typical virtualized server supported about 10 virtual machines (VMs) in 2014 and will support in excess of 12 VMs by 2017. In many organizations, the majority of production workloads are already virtualized and almost all new workloads are deployed on virtualized infrastructure, placing inexorable stress on server connectivity.
In order to accommodate this growth Twinax copper and short-reach MMF are included in the “by” standard, while 25GBASE-T (twisted pair) was added to the existing 40GBASE-T “bq” project making 25G possible in smaller data centers without having to re-wire the data center.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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