An Ignoble Experiment

2. Cisco ditches WebEx Social, partners with Jive Software

Mergers are only necessary when the emerging whole entity is greater than the sum of its parts. In recent years, this has become a rare occasion. Flying in the face of European business analysts who last February foresaw Nokia's NSN division and Juniper Networks merging, the newly minted Nokia Networks announced jointly with Juniper on Monday that they can both advance their goals with a smarter arrangement: a partnership.

The result of this partnership will be a single OpenStack-based telco cloud platform, bundling together Nokia's Liquid Core NFV and core virtualization system for managing telco service applications, Juniper's MetaFabric switching and routing architecture and Juniper's Contrail SDN platform. The move will put both companies in a better position to tackle Alcatel-Lucent, as well as Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and emerging NFV competitor HP without all that sticky reorganization hassle that Nokia doesn't exactly want to repeat right now.

Under the terms of their arrangement, Nokia will be handling the end-to-end service part of the bundle--meaning it should take the lead in selling and representing the bundle to customers.

Both SDN and NFV are architectural layers of abstraction. SDN creates an adaptable virtualized network that is best suited for the applications at hand, by dividing the control from the data plane and letting logical tables define the relationships between the virtual map and the real hardware. NFV can virtualize the real hardware, presenting a virtualized router map that can adapt more readily to the traffic it's carrying.

When the two technologies were introduced, the tech press mistook them for being competitive. Actually, they're complementary, with the result of their integration being increased and prolonged utility of more generic server hardware.

Last February, Rajeev Suri, the director of NSN's telecom business--now Nokia Networks' CEO--found himself in the position of downplaying rumors fueled by Reuters' reporting of his company merging with Juniper. At a Mobile World Congress press conference in Barcelona, Suri told reporters, "There are no synergies" between a wireless network company like his and a router and switch manufacturer like Juniper.

Just because the platform incorporates products from different markets does not mean the markets can or should merge, Suri implied. It's a clear indication that this new CEO is capable of making some well-reasoned and sound decisions, in the face of pressure from investors to make headlines.

For more:
- see the Reuters report from February
- read about Nokia's Liquid Core, Juniper Network's MetaFabric and their Contrail SDN
- read about the HP Network Functions Virtualization
- look over Rajeev Suri's comments on the partnership

Read more about: Juniper Networks
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By Scott M. Fulton, III

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4. CenturyLink to cut cloud block storage prices by 60 percent

What enterprise service vendors call "the social wave" is confusing. It's a trend where workers use their own means to communicate with one another. It drives productivity, it reduces costs, it improves morale and it benefits the business.

And that's a problem, because the revenue from all this goodness does not flow back to enterprise service vendors--not when workers are left to their own devices.

Case in point: Cisco began its journey into enterprise collaboration services just a few years ago. That journey ended last with the announcement that Cisco was partnering with Jive Software. Jive is a very popular consumer-grade, cloud-based collaboration platform provider, which is becoming more familiar to admins as they notice more and more employees using it without any strategic investment or training initiative or paradigm shifting taking place.

Back in 2009, Cisco's collaboration strategy could be described in large part with the single word "Microsoft." Essentially, Cisco provided the pipes and the routing, and Microsoft provided the servers and the front end. The key to collaboration at that time according to a Cisco strategy paper (.pdf) was "integration." The way it would provide a "media-rich collaboration experience" was to facilitate Microsoft's facilities for Windows: for telephony, Microsoft Office Communications Server; for point-of-presence, federation with Microsoft Live Communications, showing up in Microsoft Exchange Calendar; for instant messaging, Microsoft Exchange feeding into Microsoft Outlook; for document sharing, Microsoft SharePoint; for conferencing and collaboration, Microsoft Office Communicator... and the list actually doesn't stop there, but you get the general picture.

The word "social" did not appear once in this initial strategy paper.

The problem Cisco's customers must have had with this initial strategy appears to have been addressed in 2010 in a subsequent paper (.pdf) which focused on the familiar topic of return on investment.

"Strategic ROI is often hard to quantify in dollars," reads the 2010 paper. "But strategy is the area where business transformations occur. Collaboration tools help companies enter new markets; build new business models; accelerate innovation cycles and make faster, better decisions. These tools enable the major moves that lead to competitive advantage and reinvention of how you do business."

Why, O why were workers not collaborating with one another when enterprise software vendors were serving it to them under appropriate license terms? To its credit, Cisco attacked this question head-on, and came to the conclusion it needed to redefine the collaboration experience. In mid-2010, it bet big on an idea called Cisco Quad, whose usage model incorporated the iPads that were in nearly every executive's portfolio.

"Cisco Quad is an immersive platform for enterprise collaboration that integrates voice, video and social networking into one workspace," stated the company's announcement. Rather than a pipe to this Microsoft technology and a separate pipe to that one, Quad would adopt a centralized portal approach--not unlike a knowledge management system--bridging all types of content, including documents and media, into a single panel.

It took a year for many to discover Quad.

"Cisco Quad could become just what the enterprise collaboration market needs," wrote Gartner analyst Larry Cannell in 2011, "a competitive product from a large vendor with deep pockets and strong ties throughout most IT organizations." As a Cisco evangelist wrote at the time, maybe Facebook and LinkedIn were taboo in organizations, but with a little training session, certainly workers would see the advantage of using Quad instead, without feeling like they're sacrificing too much.

Quad went through one rebranding, becoming mixed into the WebEx umbrella as WebEx Social (.pdf), but ending its original life in the process. The newly branded platform's key selling point was serving as a single portal on a single platform.

But then came last week. And with a message that literally quoted Charles Darwin, for reasons Dr. Freud would certainly appreciate, Cisco VP Peder Ulander put the best face on a course change which, it must have seemed, involved a towel and the act of throwing.

"We're... announcing the end-of-sale of WebEx Social today," wrote Ulander. "As the market for enterprise social software continues to develop, we're seeing the market consolidate around key vendors. To provide the best flexibility and outcomes for our customers, we're expanding our focus to work with these vendors' products and to provide native integration with products in our collaboration portfolio. Rather than emphasize social within one product, we're making sure it's an integral part of all our products."

The enticement of using Internet Protocol as the enterprise's system of collaboration is that it's open and adaptable. The problem with this is that workers can adapt it themselves, rendering huge chunks of an entire industry almost helpless to justify their own existence. That industry happens to also be the lifeblood of the Internet, and if that industry doesn't find a new way to justify itself with substantive services that generate both revenue and praise simultaneously, the Internet will end up being hurt, and workers will end up feeling the pain anyway.

For more:
- see Jive Software's website
- download the Cisco strategy paper (.pdf)
- download the 2010 Cisco paper (.pdf)
- read a Gartner analyst's comments from 2011
- see the Cisco evangelist's comments

Read more about: NTT
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By Sean Buckley

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5. Newly discovered OpenID vulnerability not really new

CenturyLink is taking a direct hit at Amazon's dominant cloud position with a series of new pricing plans and support elements as part of a broader initiative to tout their growing set of capabilities they built internally and through key acquisitions like Tier 3 and AppFog.

Set to go live in mid-June, the service provider said it is reducing cloud-based CPU, RAM and block storage pricing by 60 percent and bandwidth pricing by 50 percent. In particular, it will charge $0.05 GB out/per month.

"CenturyLink over many years gets this concept of bringing value to customers by reducing price," said Andrew Higginbotham, senior vice president of cloud and technology at CenturyLink Technology Solutions, in an interview with FierceEnterpriseCommunications.

Besides the pricing, the service provider is also introducing a series of support bundles. Customers can choose from three support tiers, select from a list of its most popular NOC service items or work with CenturyLink's professional services team.

All of these new elements are supported by its growing base of data centers. To date, the service provider has a total of 56 data centers, including 16 nodes offering its public cloud product.

Higginbotham said the company is seeing "not only seeing new customers come in, but also CenturyLink customers as well as legacy Savvis customers moving onto this platform."

Although much of CenturyLink's key technical talent resides in its Monroe, La., location, much of the cloud services team resides in Seattle, where the telco established Cloud Development Center. Housing the cloud team there makes sense because it is the place where other dominant players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft also reside.

Following recent expansions of the public cloud capabilities into Toronto and London, CenturyLink is looking to expand into Singapore, with other possible sites in either Australia or Japan.

However compelling CenturyLink executives believe their new pricing regime is, John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, says this is an inevitable move they have to make in order to stay competitive with Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

"The public IaaS market is essentially becoming commoditized," he said. "While there may be some additional selling points, a lot of buying decisions are being based on a pure price-per-unit basis--and it is very easy to get comparative pricing from the various cloud operators. Companies like CenturyLink have little option but to respond to pricing initiatives from AWS (and Google and Microsoft) if they want to aggressively grow their IaaS revenues."

For more:
- see this blog post

Read more about: public cloud
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By Scott M. Fulton, III

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