Market mass or open standards?

At Interop this month, we heard keynotes from two network vendors who are not only archrivals in a business sense but also in their approach to the market. Cisco represents market power, account control. Juniper represents open standards. Who will win, and will the market win with them?

According to Cisco CEO John Chambers, the network is a repository for intelligence, a place to which all kinds of application features will migrate. Cisco's Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), criticized for its seeming lack of service-oriented architecture features despite its name, is emerging as a kind of network feature reservoir where Cisco hopes to store traditional features, such as virtualization and load balancing, and future ones, such as collaboration and message mediation. Buyers would likely have to adopt SONA end to end, meaning a SONA network is a Cisco network.

Juniper CEO Scott Kriens sees the enterprise at the center of a "perfect storm" of pressure, and sees the concept of open standards and guaranteed interoperability among vendors as the key to relieving that pressure. Intelligence should migrate into any network regardless of vendor, and any intelligence that's suitable from the user's perspective has to be able to make the trip into network hosting through standards accepted by all.

At one level, this debate is predictable. The guy with market mass, account control, deep pockets, rising sales, glamour and glory will always be talking about solving problems end to end with proprietary gear and strategies. Those who lack one or more of these heady attributes will pledge allegiance to open standards. Nevertheless, there are some real issues here.

IT is moving to a more open and competitive framework than ever before. The explosion of powerful microprocessors based on the x86 architecture has reshaped the hardware markets, marginalizing proprietary servers and workstations. Silicon Graphics, a high-end workstation vendor, filed for Chapter 11 the week after Chambers and Kriens gave their keynotes. At the same time, open source has revolutionized software, starting with Linux at the operating systems level and moving up to databases, then on to application middleware. IT vendors don't like that but don't have much hope of stemming the tide.

If features migrate down into the network, they migrate out of the space where open source traditionally competes. Could it be that the last bastion of proprietary IT is inside the network? Or is it possible that the open source influence on software will be enough to force network providers to adopt the standards-based approach?

Traditional network standards such as TCP or Session Initiation Protocol won't cut it these days, as far as network openness is concerned. Application middleware is creating a new interface between software and the network, an interface that is less protocol-oriented and therefore less linked to traditional network standards. Whether we're talking standard approaches to communicating applications, such as Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, or proprietary tools, such as Microsoft's forthcoming Indigo communications model, protocols are becoming disconnected from software.

But does that even relate to the mass-market-vs.-open debate in networking when it's the application players that are disconnecting applications from networks? Microsoft, IBM, Oracle or SAP seem to be more in the driver's seat on creating the new model of application networking, so will that model then push features out of IT and into networking?

It might end up that Red Hat is the player to watch on this point. With its acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat has entered the application middleware market as a kind of stand-in for the open source community and its goals. While open source can't completely control how applications and networks relate, it can provide an option.

Networking could try to take control of its own destiny, which is probably what Juniper would like to see. The question is how that goal might be accomplished. Buyers today are looking to increase their network's performance and reliability quickly, which tends to favor incumbent vendors and Cisco's "market-mass wins" strategy. Can Juniper push its open approach in a market obsessed with just getting the job done? Cooperation between the open source community and traditional IT players has been active, if sometimes uneasy. Maybe Juniper should try to get that sort of cooperation going in the networking market.