Cisco's announcement of its high-speed router has prompted a
networking vendor CAT fight. (That's a cabling joke). Competitor
Juniper Networks has fired back, accusing Cisco's of "funny math"
in its speed claims and basically saying "we were doing this
first."
My take: the details at this snapshot in time—remember,
performance is a leapfrog game—matter less than the fact that
this indicates we're on the cusp of a big bandwidth capacity
uptick, both in a macro sense and in terms of local 100 Gb Ethernet
upgrades. Perhaps more importantly, networking companies are
attempting to cement their public personas. They want non-technical
consumers to know who they are.
During their Webcast, Cisco introduced the CRS-3, positioning it as
the driver that's taking the Internet to the next level, because of
its ability to handle 322 terabits/sec of traffic. (With that kind
of capacity, you're talking video support, and cloud-hosted gaming,
not Wikipedia views.)
During the Webcast, Cisco chairman John Chambers continually
emphasized this "changing the nature of the Internet" meme. His
money quote was: "Video is the killer app."
On the other side of the coin, you have folks who point out that
all this chatter about video, and the market positioning about "we
are the Internet," is great, but basically this is just a faster
router, on the normal engineering continuum you get as you take
product lines forward.
That, I think, is basically where Juniper is coming from in the
e-mail they sent out to reporters Wednesday. Not that Cisco owes
anyone any apologies for getting the maximum press mileage out of
its announcement. That's what companies do.
Back in October, Juniper hosted an event at the New York Stock
Exchange, to announce both their listing on the exchange and the
launch of a bunch of Junos hardware, software, and partnering
products and initiatives.
Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson took the stage and put up a PowerPoint
deck showing the cover of Abbey Road. He said something to the
effect that the announcements they were making were as
revolutionary for networking as what The Beatles' final (recorded,
not released) album was for music. Which was fine by me, because
being a big Beatles fan, I'm always up for talking about the Fabs.
It just didn't have much carry-forward as a networking-related
marketing point.
I should preface the details of Juniper's e-mail, and also follow
my previous observation, by pointing out that I have enormous
respect for the technological prowess of both companies. I think
what we're seeing lately on the marketing front has little to do
with technology, but a lot to do with how a new category of vendor
(i.e. networking companies) is groping toward the establishment of
public, consumer personas and brands.