"Coring out Cisco"

I recently had a chance to catch up with Dave Roberts, CMO of Vyatta, an old friend from our previous lives. Vyatta was founded in 2005 with the mission of driving open source solutions into networking, and the goal of "coring out" value from Cisco as RedHat Linux successfully did from Sun Solaris. On the one hand, Vyatta's offering isn't particularly innovative as networking functionality (they've largely packaged and integrated other open source networking bits); on the other hand, networking software running on commodity hardware has always been viewed as a real competitive threat by Cisco. Open source works best when the offering is well defined (Linux as a version of UNIX for example) and what could be better defined than networking. Vyatta isn't the first or only vendor to produce a networking software stack, but it is one of the first to try and fully leverage an open source business model. The Vyatta code base is available for free download and use (its open source). Although you can largely get the same functions from the separate chunks that Vyatta has build on, the Vyatta "stack" is all integrated and works well together, so that saves a lot of time. Because Vyatta is free and in often works adequately on older servers that are already paid for, a lot of companies, big and small, have played with the software. For the high value use cases that almost work, Vyatta will often hear from the user either to understand when the missing functions might be available or to inquire about support (Dave tells the story of a very large enterprise CIO realizing how many "free" systems he had running and wanting very much to understand how much a site support license would cost). So the free downloads substitute for traditional and much more expensive demand creation, the users self-select to identify the best fit use cases and to help identify what should be developed next. Dave reports rapid growth over the last 1-2 years, and expects that to continue. Vyatta is still miniscule and not a business threat to Cisco, but the trends are interesting for sure.