Steve Garrison, VP of product marketing at Pica8 said that the startup already has 85 customers in the web scale and financial services markets testing its products. Several of those customers are using its gear in production, including Chinese search giant Baidu and Yahoo Japan. Customers can select their switching hardware from a selection of vendors that currently include Quanta and Synnex (the goal is to add more commodity switch makers over time) and then license the Pica8 PicOS software.

The Pica8 software works with Open vSwitch, but is designed to work with the specific Pica8 switches provided by this select menu of vendors. Garrison envisions a buyer being able to choose gear from a drop-down menu when ordering, and then build out a custom system that will then scale using the Pica8 software. Applications and machines that support Open vSwitch will integrate directly with Pica8 software and since the boxes will all support OpenFlow, it’s possible that the overall system will be as open as a custom-built system with those goals in mind.

Since Pica8′s founders’ background is in the commodity hardware-building business, it understands the model associated with selling programmable gear that does exactly what webscale buyers want. The caveat is that buyers must rip out their old gear and replace it with new gear to use the Pica8 software. The customer then pays for the boxes and licenses the software to run them. Basically, low-cost hardware is the carrot that gets customers to buy into the software.

Another stealth mode startup targeting this market is Cumulus Networks, which was built by ex-Cisco executives. Garrison admits that it is early days for true software defined networks, but he expects the technology to have a big impact in the year ahead.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets
• The promise of software-defined networking

It’s also a series of announcements that are as manipulated as a Dallas socialite’s debut. Some of the elements have been in place since spring and many of the ecosystem partners have been working with Big Switch for months. Still, like the towering hair and the glittering jewels of the debutante, this is a new announcement designed for maximum effect — and it does impress.

On the ecosystem side Big Switch has disclosed a pantheon of formal partners as well as other players in the networking world that didn’t want a partnership but Big Switch engineers found a way to integrate into its ecosystem anyway. (Guess what category VMware, which purchased Big Switch rival Nicira for $1.26 billion last summer, is in?)

Aside from the partners noted above, Big Switch has also rolled out actual products, including its controller software. The Big Network Controller builds upon the company’s open source Floodlight controller. But like any business hoping to make money in the open-source world, Big Switch wrapped some enterprise-class features around the Floodlight kernel. Those features generally aim to make the allocation of networking resources more automated, much like a Platform as a Service makes deploying servers in support of application automated.

Altogether the Big Network Controller acts as an orchestration layer that will use the Open Flow protocol to talk to the networking equipment below it and also has a northbound API that lets Big Switch and third-party networking applications talk “down” to the controller. And speaking of those networking applications, Big Switch is starting off with two. One, the Big Virtual Switch, will virtualize the network, essentially what Nicira does for customers, and the second, Big Tap, is a monitoring product that lets applications see all the packets flowing through the network and then decide how to treat them.

When you put the two announcements together you get a company that has taken the promise of Open Flow and is using it to break apart the vertical integration that has been the norm in the networking industry. Yet even as it tries to let in new players and reduce the need for a customer to buy a series of products from only Cisco or Juniper(or from an F5 or a Riverbed at higher layers in the stack) thanks to it pulling together the partnerships (or working around vendors who don’t want to play nice) it has made an effort to deliver the assurances that corporate IT buyers need when trying to buy different products from different vendors — namely that they’ll work together.

This is a debutante that means business.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012

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The result is Blue Planet, controller software that has the ability to work with any vendor’s switches and underlying gear as well as APIs that let gear and applications sitting above the Cyan controller software talk to networking hardware. The product is akin to the controller software that Big Switch and Nicira sell. Big Switch just raised a $25 million Series B round of funding, while this summer Nicira was bought by VMware in a deal valued at $1.26 billion.

The catch for Cyan is that its primary market isn’t the data center, although Cyan Co-founder Eric Clelland notes that the company’s controller software can work there as well. But the target market is core Cyan customers (there are 120 of them so far) of ISPs and carriers who have already been buying its packet optical networking gear. Clelland said the company’s sales, while undisclosed, have grown at 100 percent year over year. He declined to discuss revenue profitability or the number of employees, but said the company is on a run rate to break $100 million in sales in 2012.

So far,with Blue Planet, Cyan is offering a slight twist on the traditional software defined networking story. First is that it’s going after a different market than many of the other vendors, although Nicira does have deployments with both AT&T and NTT both communications companies with IP transit businesses. Carriers may move more slowly than the large data center customers, but they are desperate to find cheaper ways to manage their networks as well as build services on top of their networks. This is slightly different from Nicira’s promise of SDNs as a way to virtualize networking, i.e., abstract the physical networking hardware from the virtual machines — giving data center operators more flexibility.

Instead the Cyan vision is closer to the promise that software defined networks will bring programmability to networks and allow applications to talk to the network directly. With both a northbound and southbound API, Cyan’s controller lets applications talk to the switches and the switch can talk to the applications. Most providers offer a northbound API that lets the switch talk to the applications, but that’s about the extent of the “conversation.”

Cyan also offers its own apps that customers can deploy as part of the overall Blue Planet software –although customers can build their own. However, I can see several of the smaller metro Ethernet providers and cable companies who are Cyan customers buying up an existing solution rather than rolling their own. Apps might include real-time bandwidth management based on customer demand and existing policies or dynamic bandwidth delivery for certain customers. The company’s controller software works with both Open Flow-compliant devices as well as legacy gear — another mark in its favor since few companies are likely to get excited about ripping out their old network to use SDNs.

As more companies emerge in this space with different philosophies around software defined networking, different views of the OpenFlow protocol that has all but disappeared from many conversations, and even different end customers, there’s no shortage of both marketing and opportunity. I think Cyan has certainly found an opportunity — after all it’s customers have long appreciated its software as well as its boxes — and I look forward to seeing how the metro Ethernet and carrier space deploys SDNs.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
• The promise of software-defined networking

Founded two years ago by Appenzeller and Kyle Forster, Big Switch’s big bet is that companies want to be able to add nifty new features — even applications — to their network infrastructure without buying expensive, often proprietary hardware. In that arena, it is seen as a rival to Nicira, the SDN company that VMware bought for nearly $1.3 billion in July.

Given the huge Nicira valuation, Big Switch’s $25 million round (which brings its total venture funding to about $39 million) seems small, but Appenzeller said he is thrilled with the funding and with the opportunity to work with Redpoint General Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who will advise the company. Existing backers Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures also participated in this round.

There were rumors a few months ago that EMC Ventures wanted to make a large investment in Big Switch. And given that EMC owns 80 percent of VMware — which now controls Nicira — that would have given EMC considerable sway in the SDN market. No one at Big Switch would comment on EMC but they did say there was considerable interest by many parties who wanted to participate in this round. The company still considers itself in stealth mode with several unnamed companies using an early version of its SDN controller.

Appenzeller, who started Big Switch after an academic career at Stanford, is bullish about the prospects for this technology and the ability for small, lean startups to compete with even big companies. (Perhaps big companies like VMware?)

“We have a good head start. When we initially launched we had to apologize for starting a networking company. That’s definitely changed — networking is a vibrant sector,” he said. “This is completely different from the past. Big Switch is a very deceptive name — we build controllers for SDN but we don’t build or ship any hardware,” he said.

Dharmaraj concurred. Big Switch “could have raised a lot more money if they wanted … but this is not a traditional networking play like a Juniper or a Cisco, which required $50 million to $100 million. They’re building software! They don’t need to build special ASICs or other hardware,” he said.

After the Nicira deal, the conventional wisdom was that Big Switch – or maybe Embrane — would be the next SDN company on the block. That may or not be case but in the short term, it looks like Big Switch will forge ahead on its own, with a little help from its new VCs.

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Big Switch wants developers, startups and most importantly — potential acquirers — to know that it is not only still relevant, but that it might be the sole “open” choice left for those looking at software defined networking and pondering how to implement the underlying virtualization of the network. Check out the quote form the release from Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks.

“This further solidifies Floodlight’s API interface as the standard for programming SDN networks, and will make it easier for customers to avoid vendor lock-in as OpenFlow applications developed by Big Switch, third parties or their own in-house developers become available.”

In other words, Big Switch is not only still relevant, but it’s also the platform play for software defined networks as opposed to an element of VMware’s future software defined data center products, which will likely require buying into VMware’s overall vision and software licenses. But, since VMware has yet to close on the Nicira acquisition or detail its plans and products for the software defined data center, the release is mostly about FUD and enticing a likely buyer.

So who might that buyer be? Likely candidates include Citrix (hey it bought XenSource, the maker of an open source hypervisor); IBM, which has a partnership with Big Switch and has its own controller software and evolving strategy around SDN; and Intel, which is a chipmaker but invests more than many realize in software and has a big stake in getting deeper into the networking chip market as computing and networking converge. Update: I was called out on Twitter for not including the big networking companies in this list, but was trying to go beyond the obvious of Cisco, Juniper, HP and Arista. Still, those companies too are potential buyers of Big Switch, although of those I think Juniper and HP would be the more likely acquirers.

Regardless, the Big Switch guys are right when they put the focus of software defined networks on applications, as opposed to the mechanism for virtualizing the hardware. While the controller and virtualization layers will likely dictate who gets revenue today in the SDN market, it’s the potential that the applications will unleash that will provide the most value. Much as virtualization of the server helped pave the way for cloud computing, virtualization of the network will allow for new ways of thinking about connectivity — in the data center, carrier networks and even in the home.

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• The promise of software-defined networking

VMware’s Herrod discussing the software-defined data center at Structure.

VMware’s planned acquisition of Nicra for $1.25 billion represents the evolution of networking beyond the hardware-dominated point of view that has sustained the industry for decades. On the same day Cisco said it would cut 2 percent of its workforce,VMware said it would spend roughly 20 percent of its cash buying a networking startup with around 100 employees. Those two seemingly unrelated moves are actually signposts in the journey to networking’s future.

Even as Cisco was detailing its restructuring, VMware punched it in the gut with this purchase, essentially telling its longtime partner that it can stick around for the ride but it will have to stay in the trunk. Meanwhile, the bevy of startups that have identified themselves as part of the software-defined networking zeitgeist are thrilled by the valuation and the events this deal will set in motion.

The clouds guys versus the switch guys.

Facebook’s vanity-free server.

The data center is changing, brought about by the needs of companies like Google or Facebook building out massive data centers and by the stresses and opportunities created by server virtualization. These things are changing the types of gear put into data centers as well as economics of IT. If you are Facebook or Google, every dollar you spend on compute needs to produce a dollar of revenue, which is why both spend so much time developing optimized low-cost computing for their workloads. At the same time, data centers and IT infrastructure requires huge amounts of hardware, and the customers of that hardware want simplicity.

The story is similar for cloud providers, but they also have a greater variety of workloads running on their systems and a greater variety of hardware. Tied to the rise of the cloud is also the looming irrelevance of enterprise computing and, with it, specialty enterprise gear.

In networking, this plays itself out in the rise of companies such as Arista, which offer high-performance boxes made with merchant silicon. Or in the forms of Cumulus Networks or Pica8, both startups seeking to disrupt the hardware side of networking with simpler boxes and a fabric to pull them all together. Those fabrics would run underneath a Nicira controller, making these hardware components complimentary to the emergence of the software-defined data centers. At the core, these value-adds are in the software, not in the hardware.

A similar shift has occurred in the server market as it matured. Server vendors gradually saw their hardware margins erode as their boxes became more commoditized and their manufacturers begin competing with them. The server business is realigning to meet the needs of webscale and cloud computing. VMware, along with many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, is betting that same shift will occur in networking.

Who controls the control points?

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

As Kyle Forster of Big Switch, a rival startup to Nicira, explained to me, there have been two ways of attacking the problem in the networking world — from the point of view of the hypervisor or from the top-of-rack switch. Forster says Nicira and his company both started in the middle and Big Switch has drifted over to the hardware top-of-rack side, while Nicira tended to drift toward the hypervisor. That makes the VMware buy a perfect match, but it also highlights where the lines may be drawn when it comes to the future of networking.

The future is still open for a switch-centric vision (with most of the value still tied to software running on that switch), but it underlies the fact that the fights here are about where the points of control — and profits — are in the data center. And no one really believes it’s about the hardware as a stand-alone box. Even companies like Cisco or Juniper that still sell big boxes are investing in software. Their boxes are packed with software that drives up the cost and complexity associated with their gear. But as Facebook’s Frank Frankovsnky and just about everyone I spoke to for this story notes, the data center of the future is getting pulled apart.

This means the hardware is less complicated and disaggregated, but also that the software running on that hardware will be tied together using orchestration layers. The money will be made by selling services tied to those orchestration layers. Maybe you buy a hypervisor or controller that already has what you need, or maybe those who own those control points parcel out deep access to them via partnerships and licenses that will net the owners money or influence. Probably, it will be a mixture of both.

VMware provides that orchestration layer for servers while Nicira is the one providing it for the logical layers of the network. The hardware startups mentioned earlier are providing it for the physical transport of the bits around a data center. That leaves room for other startups at the higher layers such as Embrane, Varmour, LineRate Systems and others.

So who is the next SDN buy?

Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Embrane; Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO, Niciria
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Dante Malagrino, the CEO of Embrane, said this deal is exciting not just because of the incredible valuation (although, as the CEO of a startup, that’s plenty exciting) but because the deal validates the model of a disaggregated and software-based approach to networking. “VMware is sending a very strong signal to HP, Brocade, Cisco and soon-to-be-former partners, all of which have been fairly active and vocal about networking as hardware,” Malagrino said. “The network is the fundamental ingredient of the software-defined data center and VMware is absolutely acknowledging that.”

However, Malagrino noted that Cisco or Juniper and other hardware-focused players shouldn’t be counted out. Perhaps that’s because he thinks that his startup is a good potential acquisition target, noting that to counter the Nicira and VMware duo, the hardware guys can hedge their bets by buying services that play on top of this software defined data center. There’s also Cisco’s spin out of Insieme, its stealthy attempt to address some of the networking needs of scale-out data centers.

However one slices it, the VMware-Nicira deal was a high-water point for the myriad networking startups out there trying to bring the old way of networking into today’s cloud and webscale world. And this deal won’t be the last. When asked if anyone has tried to acquire Big Switch, Co-founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller said, “We’ve been asked, but we haven’t returned their phone calls so far.”

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

The idea of software defined networking enabled by the open-source OpenFlow protocol is under threat from corporations intent on using the OpenFlow name and the promise of software defined networking to lock buyers into their gear, according to a Big Switch Networks executive. Kyle Forster, a co-founder of Big Switch says the company has encountered buyers of its technology that are concerned and confused about what is so open about OpenFlow and SDNs in general.

So is OpenFlow, the open source protocol that underlies software defined networking, getting subsumed by corporate interest and a marketing white wash? Or is Big Switch Networks, which is pushing an open source version of a new networking technology, promoting this idea as a means to differentiate itself and discredit the competition?

The technology we’re talking about here is so early, that products using OpenFlow or pitching software defined networks were just announced last year. And so far, few companies have put any of these products or ideas into practice in their production networks. But if you want to control a developing technology, it’s good to get in there early.

A big opportunity in networking awaits.

Big Switch is one of many startups attempting to build technologies that will virtualize the networking layer inside the data center, and it hopes to do this with an open source-based controller that can run on commodity hardware. So far it hasn’t announced clients, but Forster says folks are out there using its software. The benefits of an open software defined network setup are twofold: owners of virtualized servers can manage their networks using code instead of messing with the physical infrastructure, and they can implement this without paying big bucks for specialized gear that requires specialized code to control it.

The creation of OpenFlow, an open source protocol that allows a commodity server to tell a switch what to do, has enabled companies like Big Switch to build out controllers to offer software defined networks. However, other companies are also offering software defined networks– those that are programmable and virtualize the physical infrastructure. But those aren’t necessarily built on Open Flow.

Nicira, for example offers a way to build scale out virtualized networks and uses OpenFlow, but only as a small aspect of its controller product. Other vendors such as IBM, HP, NEC, Cisco and Juniper also are offering software defined networks that may incorporate OpenFlow, but also have other elements that are specific to that vendor and their gear. IBM and Juniper are both talking a lot about services and systems that are tied to their boxes.

Big Switch is taking a different tack, attempting to not only rely on the OpenFlow protocol, but also open sourcing its Floodlight controller, that actually controls the virtualized network. Big Switch hopes to make its money by offering consulting and services for customers, such as creating easy to build stacks of infrastructure using OpenStack and its Floodlight controller for example. Floodlight has been downloaded more than 1,000 times saus Big Switch.

Get ready for FUD, claims of closed ecosystems and OpenFlow-washing galore.

The battle here is fairly significant. Networking has to change to meet the needs of virtualized and webscale infrastructure. In many cases where compute is elastic, it’s the network holding systems administrators back — the elasticity stops at the network. But networking is also a big business for the companies mentioned above, and one they’d rather not see become commodity hardware and open source software. That could crush their margins.

Adding to the stakes is the general lack of know how about networking, which has been shrouded in speciality programming, given credit and blame for security and compliance issues, and is overall pretty complicated stuff. So the folks trying to keep their SDN-enabling products less interoperable have a good reason to do so. Making SDNs easy to deploy takes a lot of know how. But on the other side, many large-scale data centers aren’t going to settle for expensive, proprietary systems that they can’t easily adapt to their needs.

Big Switch agrees. In a release this morning it offers:

Successes such as Hadoop, MySQL and Linux demonstrate the importance of open source in every major software revolution that has taken place in the past decades. As networking is becoming more software-oriented, open source provides complete transparency on the quality of its code while enabling customers to benefit from contributions made by the active open source SDN community and more importantly prevent vendor lock-in in the new network landscape.

That touches a bit on the issue of continuing innovation, which can be hard in a closed ecosystem. Nick Lippis, industry analyst and publisher of the Lippis Report, says that Big Switch may be using the fears about OpenFlow getting closed off as marketing, but the issue is an important one if the industry wants to continue innovating. Lippis believes it will be crucial for switches to be able to talk to a variety of controllers as well as open APIs that allow programmers to talk to the overall network.

That’s the future, but already he sees worrisome tactics already at play by networking vendors. “We’re seeing more [networking] companies taking the term SDN and repackaging their products in an SDN context, Lippis said. “And the open issue will be important as we move further into product adoption.”

So the question appears to be if OpenFlow and software defined networks will be closed off before they ever really get a chance to bloom.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
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• The promise of software-defined networking

Those five areas are switching and routing, the data center, collaboration, video, and architectures for business transformation. In the past year Cisco has done six acquisitions, with half of those occurring in the past three quarters while it was handling its restructuring. As we have documented, Cisco’s previous forays into M&A have helped the company spread its bets on emerging technology around, but they haven’t always helped it boost its bottom line. Cisco also had seemed to lose focus in previous years, letting other firms come into its market and take share.

Based on the financial results at the end of Cisco’s fiscal second quarter of 2012, the company has $46.7 billion available in cash and cash equivalents. It is profitable and is generating cash as well after completing its reorganization, which has cut $1 billion off its annual run rate. In response to questions about M&A strategy on the call, Chambers said that the acquisition strategy remains the same, buying companies with about 100 engineers and products close to coming to market that Cisco customers tell the company it should buy. He pointed to the acquisitions of Tandberg and Starent as good examples of deals and said that of all the large players out there making acquisitions only Oracle had a similar success rate as Cisco when it came to integrating deals.

If Cisco is back in the shopping mood, we have a few suggestions for places where it should start. It should go all-in on the cloud, which seems like where Cisco wants to focus anyhow.

Since software-defined networks and OpenFlow are clearly an emerging area in the networking space, Cisco should shell out money for a player in this space. Big Switch would be a good bet, as it is trying to create an ecosystem using open-source controllers and then focusing on building services and applications on top of that platform. The model is different for Cisco, but the focus on enterprise applications and services is one that would benefit Cisco and lead to higher margins.

As clouds are deployed, monitoring and tracking websites and application performance from within the network are important for Cisco and its enterprise clients, which is why New Relic could also be a good pick for the company. New Relic’s SaaS-based software monitors performance and tracks issues back to the data center to help enterprises or website owners pinpoint bottlenecks and problems.

If Cisco wants to go big, my colleague Derrick Harris suggests that NetApp might be a good buy, because it reduces Cisco’s reliance on EMC, a relationship that is rumored to be on the rocks. If it is not NetApp, any storage vendor with a strong virtualization story and promise in the enterprise would help bolster Cisco’s burgeoning server division as well as its storage networking lineup.

Given the array of startups bringing both intelligence and performance improvements to different areas of the network, there are plenty of opportunities for Cisco to pick up new customers, technology and market share by buying a startup or established company. Who do you think Cisco should snap up?

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• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Dante Malagrino (far right) at Structure 2011.

Embrane, the not-so-stealthy startup that’s one of several hoping to make it big on the concept of virtualizing the network, launched on Sunday. The company, founded in 2010 by Dante Malagrinò, has raised $27 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and North Bridge Venture Partners with the goal of providing software that will deliver services over software defined networks.

The idea of software defined networks is finally coming into its own. Startups including Big Switch, Nicira, ConteXtream and large companies such as VMware, Cisco and Juniper all espouse the need to change the network to make it more flexible to gain the efficiencies the computing side of the business has already gained with virtualization. The goal is to abstract the physical elements of the network so it can keep pace with the virtual machines that spin up and down inside a virtualized environment. One way of doing this is via the Open Flow protocol, but other companies such as Cisco, Juniper and HP  are also trying out different ways of creating such a virtualized network.

The goal of any software defined network is to help companies scale their networks in line with their compute resources and reduce the need for a network engineer to manually reconfigure boxes to handle fluctuating server workloads. For more on the topic, please read our research report on software defined networks and Open Flow. (sub req’d).

In line with this new network vision, Embrane wants to provide services such as firewalls, load balancers and whatever else might be required over a software defined network. So while it can work on networks using Open Flow, it can also work on other virtualized networks. Denis Martin, the chief technology officer at hosting company, NaviSite, said his company is replacing Cisco and Citrix   load balancers and firewalls with Embrane’s software in its cloud product because Embrane’s software can scale along with the new virtual machines NaviSite’s clients spin up and down on demand.

“We have extreme density in the compute layer with 50 or 60 machines on a single blade and with 10 to 15 per customer but we still needed a dedicated firewall pair for them on each blade. So then I have five customers and 10 dedicated firewalls on a single blade,” Martin said. “[The firewalls and load balancers] were overrunning the floor space.”

Embrane’s heleos software is aimed at cloud service providers, and as Martin pointed out, it scales, unlike some of the dedicated hardware or even appliances currently available for network services. However, even with $27 million and big-name backers, Embrane is going up against some tough competition in Cisco, Citrix and other networking vendors. Its expected client base is used to buying from large vendors and might not rush to take a chance on a startup, even a startup with an executive team that comes from the established networking companies.

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• OpenFlow and beyond: future opportunities in networking
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