Comments on: Are Cisco and Red Hat Getting Cozy?

By: Al

Al — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:13:37 +0000

Having worked at Cisco for eight years previously, Cisco certainly used Linux for many different product lines typically on management platforms, SAN products or Wireless controllers. There is a lot of ’siloed’ expertise as someone pointed out earlier.

I think the point that isn’t being brought up is that Cisco now views Microsoft as its #1 threat in unified communications and other areas. I think they are just solidly placing themselves on the other side to be honest. They see a cost/competitive advantage and want to help set the “other” standard.

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:07:29 +0000

Dim @5: Great to hear, but many people in CSCO are only now getting a feel for open source. The VAR Guy has covered CSCO since 1992… Linux got its start in the early 1990s. Red Hat went public in 1999… Now, CSCO is finally waking up to the world of open source. It’s one thing to “work” with red hat in a working group, it’s quite another for CSCO to open its wallet and sponsor a major Red Hat event. Correction: The major Red Hat event of the year. Smart move on CSCO’s part, The VAR Guy believes.

By: Dim

Dim — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:05:09 +0000

Quoting from here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/mrg.html

“As a working group member of AMQP, Cisco has been collaborating with Red Hat for over 18 months on low-latency optimization of AMQP and MRG Messaging open middleware protocols across InfiniBand compute fabrics,” said Bill Erdman, marketing director, Data Center Technology Group at Cisco. “Through this collaboration with Red Hat we are insuring that MRG is fully interoperable and offers enhanced services, including quality of service, manageability and increased delivery reliability.”

By: From the Admin Corner

From the Admin Corner — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:35:01 +0000

An other explanation: chance are that all sorts of System and Network Admins would attend such conf therefore it would be an other mean to reach one of their core audience.

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:01:26 +0000

Joe: The VAR Guy understands your points, but there were key “silos” of expertise in Cisco. Sure, some Cisco insiders knew about free and open source software. But a great many people in Cisco marketing didn’t understand how the worlds of networking, open source and applications would converge two years ago.

Here we are in 2008, and everyone is marching toward unified communications — CRM, databases and other apps tied to unified call centers, etc.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:37:20 +0000

“2006, Cisco could barely utter the term “open source,” and company insiders weren’t familiar with industry players like Canonical, SugarCRM or MySQL”

I would expect not. Canonical was barely a blip in 2006. Canonical is still a _tiny_ player in the Open Source are, regardless of their relentless marketing machine. And what would SugarCRM have to do with Ciscos’ primary business? Or a database? Maybe if you where mentioning python-twisted, Cacti, Nagios, nmap or a host of other applications that might have something to do with their core business they would reacted differently.

Cisco has been working with F/LOSS developers for years – they are now just publicizing the fact.

By: Frankie Says

Frankie Says — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:28:56 +0000

I think this has more to do with open source networking and less to do with unified open source applications. Most ISVs, open or closed source, aren’t writing unified applications yet.