We had a number of interesting briefings from Cisco recently. Maybe we're just getting older (undeniable fact) but it's really exhausting to try and keep up with Cisco innovation, and from time to time you wish they would get smug and self-contented and just back down for a while. One briefing was about the empowered branch (every possible gizmo for your ISR router you could hope for). The second was about the Campus network fabric. We're told that CMO Sue Bostrom is working hard to make Cisco focus more on the value proposition and less on the feeds and speeds when marketing is done. Can't come a minute too soon if you ask us. The Campus fabric announcement is a great example: Cisco improved the switch software so pairs of switches could share state and be managed as a single switch. That seems to have been quite an engineering accomplishment. But the impact to the customer is simple and dramatic because all of a sudden standby switches can share load and you get a 2X cost-performance improvement. You would think that would be on slide #1; not the case. And to add insult to injury Cisco calls this switch "virtualization" because that's the term used in the network community, as if "virtualization" wasn't overloaded enough already. Since we doubt that Cisco will slow down innovation and engineering anytime soon we're rooting for Sue's team to simplify the explanations so our aging heads won't hurt so much (or in this case should it be "routing"?)
