Former Cisco boss launches upstart to rattle old employer's cage
- Reference: 1663249513
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/15/john_chambers_nile/
- Source link:
Branded as Nile, the business stumbled into the sunlight yesterday after exiting stealth mode. It has the backing of Chambers and Pankaj Patel, one-time Cisco exec veep and chief development officer, who is CEO of the new biz.
Never one for hyperbole, [1]Chambers said on LinkedIn that Nile is to "lead network market transition with biggest change to industry in over a decade. As the first self driven network platform, Nile's approach is focused on disruptive simplicity.
[2]
"In an industry historically known for add-ons and new features to define growth, the Nile team went back to the drawing board to come up with a 'new system' that will uniquely transform how customers acquire, deploy, consume, support, secure, and grow their networks, providing much needed simplicity, reduced risk, and total cost of ownership."
[3]
[4]
The intent is to deliver an out-of-the-box Zero Trust network with "no network operations required." Each user and every device is to be "automatically segmented and every request authenticated and evaluated" before access is given.
The cost will be based on consumption, the classic as-a-service model that many [5]traditional hardware companies are now using to compete in the cloud era . The network design is said include physical and virtual instrumentation, providing monitoring, analytics, and ML-driven automation.
[6]
Technical details are scant.
The organization hard launches with 170 employees and comes armed with 40 patents and $125 million in funding from March Capital, 8VC, JC2 Ventures, ICONIQ, and others.
It is going to market via 50 third-party sellers in North America where Nile's campus LAN and WLAN products are going to be sold in the coming months – no firm date was given.
[7]
Patel said in a statement: "This journey is all about a once in a decade opportunity to create something disruptive – not just for the sake of disruption – but to create something that can resolve the complexity of networking and deliver simple access to a very reliable, extremely high-performance network – and we've done it.
[8]Ex-Cisco chief John Chambers: Tech biz bods are 'too arrogant'
[9]Cisco execs pledge simpler, more integrated networks
[10]Cloud, on-prem ... we've got the network service to rule them all, says AWS
[11]Cisco compresses Catalyst switches to compact size
"Why is that important? Because while the world has changed, networking largely hasn't. Of the $25 billion in hardware spent each year in wired and wireless access technology, we estimate another $75 billion is spent in operations. This simply isn't sustainable, yet the entrenched incumbents have not responded, with business models, ecosystems, and an installed base to protect and they'd have to completely re-engineer their own existing platforms. Nile changes that – now watch us grow."
Chambers was always worried about Huawei and Arista Networks when he was boss of Cisco, viewing them as relative upstarts in the networking market. Huawei because he feared it could undercut Cisco on price, and Arista because of its software-defined approach.
El Reg wonders if current Cisco boss Chuck Robbins is getting jittery. Maybe not just yet. ®
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[1] https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAAAlwkBY9Z5Nu5LA4X7SySW1E84AS5PJbA&keywords=pankaj%20patel&mentionsMember=%5B%22ACoAAAAAlwkBY9Z5Nu5LA4X7SySW1E84AS5PJbA%22%5D&position=0&searchId=b891991b-b813-4237-88a5-2e87dd660f56&sid=E()&update=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A(urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6975852746616823808%2CBLENDED_SEARCH_FEED%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse)
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YyNMH2e5kEkuz8Hsq1@knQAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YyNMH2e5kEkuz8Hsq1@knQAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YyNMH2e5kEkuz8Hsq1@knQAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/hardware_as_subscription_not_ideal/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YyNMH2e5kEkuz8Hsq1@knQAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YyNMH2e5kEkuz8Hsq1@knQAAABM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/05/john_chambers_tech_execs_are_arrogant/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/16/cisco_live_execs_promise_simpler_networks/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/14/aws_wan_service/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/catalyst_9200_compact/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The real reason for the USA's stance on Huawei
Aside from the CCP "All your networks & traffic are belong to us."
Until it goes wrong...
" The intent is to deliver an out-of-the-box Zero Trust network with "no network operations required "
Once it's widely adopted, there'll soon be nobody with the expertise to cope when it goes wrong (that that doesn't just mean "breaks" - it also means when it makes bad decisions that stop work in its tracks). This is yet another exemplar of the theory that replacing people with machines automatically improves performance. While this may be valid where the people are not more than average performers, it certainly doesn't when they're the best. But of course the best people are expensive, so that's probably the primary incentive for replacing them with machines. However, in real emergencies where it's not obvious what's going wrong, only an expert human can take the holistic view and use inference to arrive at corrective action. Every "intelligent" automaton we've created so far has essentially been a one trick horse, but what's needed in such emergencies is flexibility - a broad appreciation of all the facets of the entire situation (even sometimes the seemingly irrelevant). That takes lots of human experience, intuition and attention to detail - attributes of the human mind at its best.
Re: Until it goes wrong...
I took a different view - it would be replacing the average people rather than the top tier people. There's a lot of average people out there who only need to be average because the needs of their network are average.
How many small (< 500 employees) companies out there who need to plug in desktops and some servers, some VPNs, and a couple of uplinks? How many even smaller companies (< 100 employees) with similar but more limited needs are there?
I agree though that having people around for when things go wrong (as they inevitably will) is important. I would not want a network with no network people around.
Re: Until it goes wrong...
" I would not want a network with no network people around "
A mojor problem will be maintaining the expertise even of the best. The more that is automated, the less exposure even the experts have to day to day normality. Consequently, when the abnormal starts to happen it's less obvious and they're out of practice so the response will be slower and less effective. We have to keep getting our hands dirty to stay skilled.
Re: Until it goes wrong...
"How many small (< 500 employees) companies out there who need to plug in desktops and some servers, some VPNs, and a couple of uplinks"
Lots of us, probably. I'm not a networking expert. I'm happy to tinker with my LAN until it goes titsup and I have to load the last router backup, but that's as far as it goes. Every so often I tell myself I'll read up on it and set up my NAS as a mail server, surveillance centre, website, etc. but until I understand it well enough I won't do anything that opens my LAN to the outside world. I certainly wouldn't trust a set of plug-an-play boxen to do it for me automatically and if I needed such a set up tomorrow I'd pay a pro to set it up for me.
The assumption that zero-trust will work for everything is a bit strange. Yes, you can make an automaticity configured network router if you can assume that all devices fall in to a specific category of use/authentication, and that all use-cases are basically along the same lines.
Still, will be interesting to see how it pans out in real life when someone wants to fit one to a complex legacy environment.
The real reason for the USA's stance on Huawei
-> Huawei because he feared it could undercut Cisco on price
There it is. A few quiet words in politicians' ears + some unsolicited donations to political parties = sanctions against a foreign company.