Cisco, Juniper & Next Generation Networks

In an April 2005 article titled Cisco and Juniper Joust for Supremacy, noted industry consultant Tom Nolle compares and contrasts Juniper's and Cisco's approach.

From a layered perspective, both schemes appear to have the same decomposition: 3 layers in both prescriptions. The devil, of course, is in the details.

Juniper's Infranet:
A quick summary of the Infranet approach, available on the Infranet web site, describes it in 3 layers: signaling stratum, control stratum and data stratum.

Cisco's NGN:
Cisco describes its solution in terms of application convergence, service convergence and network convergence.

Apart from the innocuous equivalence of the 3 layers in either approach, a fundamental difference between the two approaches seems to be in the use of basic IP connectivity to accomplish future services off the "new Internet", be it Cisco's NGN or Juniper's Infranet. Before any kind of a new service can be provided to a subscriber, basic IP connectivity must be present. (The entire world has now gotten used to the ubiquitous nature of IP connectivity; you are too late if you are thinking differently). Thus, it seems that Cisco's idea is superior, particularly if the new ISP will only provide new services in a "container" that a subscriber has specifically requested through a secure request.

Telecommunication Equipment Production in India

It appears that the Indian IT sector is getting seriously into the act of augmenting the needs of telecom equipment providers, rather than assist only telecom service providers. And, this realization has occurred at the highest levels of the Central government, as this quote from IT and Communications minister, Dayanidhi Maran, indicates:

" ... India can emerge as the global hub for making telecom equipment ..."

This could mean a highly accelerated growth in this IT sector: telecom equipment providers, worldwide, please take note.

" ... a router is not just a router anymore", - Mike Volpi.

This is what Volpi said today in connection with the release of a new family of routers for small and medium size businesses (SMBs). Once you combine voice, video and data transmission in a single device, the router, the basic routing engine merely becomes a platform because it has to cater now to specialized treatment of the so-called triple-play traffic.
In another news today, Cisco acquired dynamicSoft to strengthen the intelligence needed inside the network. Good move.

Books Online

My professional membership group, the Association for Computing Machinery, has introduced a remarkably valuable new online service to its members, Welcome to ACM's Online Books Program!. This is definitely very valuable and I hope more organizations make use of this. Of course, the one of the behind-the-scenes beneficiary in this food chain is Books24x7 Inc.

City of San Jose and Cisco Systems

Today's news item regarding collusion between the city of San Jose and Cisco Systems makes for interesting reading. Although I am only a bystander to this story, it seems like this may not be a case of collusion. Rather, some uninformed individual or individuals must have retained Cisco's professional services group to help them out thinking that "nobody got fired for using Cisco" ... I can't believe any corporation, particularly one as business savvy as Cisco, would rig up a solution like the way the article suggests, that there was a collusion. It is interesting, however, to watch the audit report when it comes out tomorrow.

Use of Railroad Metaphor in the Computer & Networking Industry

The 21 July 2004 blog by Jonathan Schwartz is a wonderfully simple, but very thought-provoking, discussion of how he believes Sun can monetize Java. He has explained the monetization approach by comparing technological components that Sun has created or contributed to - namely, NFS, Java, J2EE, Project Liberty, etc. - to railroad gauges. "Once the [railroad gauge] standards were set", he argues, "these companies saw a massive increase in opportunity to sell - not rails - but locomotives and rail cars." You cannot but appreciate the argument but, of course, the proper "locomotives and rail cars" to ride on the "bandwidth railroad" would need to be created, and the companies creating the "locomotives and rail cars" are the ones that will make the money.

Service Provider Network Evolution.

The transformation of Telecom Italia through what appears to be a central role of Metamuse's NetCool is incredible. You will find some details of this work at http://www.tmforum.org/browse.asp?catID=1118&sNode=1118&Exp=Y&linkID=28584.