New Cisco executive details aggressive SNA plans

Frank Maly is familiar with both sides of the SNA-IP war. Maly is one of the new leaders of Cisco Systems, Inc.'s InterWorks Business Unit [IBU]. Before joining Cisco, he worked with IBM in Australia as an SNA engineer. Before his promotion, he was senior manager of technical marketing at IBU. He makes no bones about his goal - to double the number of SNA/internetwork routers in the market.

Maly recently chatted with Marc Songini, staff writer at Network World, about Cisco's views on the competitive network landscape.

Q. What do you think of the state of your competitor, IBM's Networking Hardware Division [NHD]?

A. They've basically been following and they are still following even to this day. They announced the [channel-attached] 2216 router three years after we came out with a channel-attached router.

Their greatest weakness is obviously that they haven't had a good migration strategy for customers moving from SNA to IP. IBM was and is more concerned with fighting the SNA vs. IP battles.

In fact, IBM and Bay [a couple years ago] made negative statements about Cisco's channel-attached strategy, stating that they could see no need for channel interfaces on routers. Now both IBM and Bay promote their own channel-attached router/switch solutions. NHD lagged behind.

Q. Does IBM give you trouble sleeping at night?

A. I basically see the majority of IBM as complementary to Cisco. Certain parts of NHD we compete with, but the way I look at it is the way the customer does -they would tell you they'd love to see IBM and Cisco get together. Maybe even IBM and Cisco and Microsoft [Corp.] IBM would be the mainframe and apps king, Cisco the networking king, and Microsoft the client and server king.

Cisco is always paranoid about all competitors - even start-ups. We never sit back on our laurels.

Q. How will you be different from your marketing predecessor, who was a visible, vocal proponent of the IBU?

A. My predecessor, Nick Francis, was responsible for promoting and educating the marketplace about the SNA-to-IP migration. His job was convincing data-center people that IP was viable. It was a sales job, really - selling the idea to customers and end users.

I will be focusing more on the implementation of the ideas - executing the migration strategy. The SNA-to-IP battle is not the issue. Right now the current job is not answering the question, Will this [IP] work? but, How do I implement this network scaling to thousands of nodes? My job is to help the industry and salespeople and help our third parties to implement these things quickly and efficiently and start exploiting the tools.

Q. Some people are saying Cisco is starting to look a lot like another IBM.

A. Certainly Cisco is growing rapidly as a company. However, Cisco is very focused on customers. For example, look at [Cisco CEO] John Chambers. Recently he formed lines of business, the ISP line of business, the enterprise line of business., and in there there are units that focus on more specific lines of business. He's also focused on customer support and links it directly to our performance. He monitors our success on customer satisfaction. When I began at Cisco, the IBU consisted of approximately four people. Now there are 300.

Q. How do you view the mainframe's role in the future?

A. There is a large amount of corporate data that currently sits on mainframes. What's changing is that mainframes were typically private resources. Now they're becoming more public. They've become attached to the Internet and opened up the world. Now it's got to have Web enablement. The mainframe,big CICS good at, better able to extract data than making it into a big webserver. I see the mainframe evolving. Now theyk're transactino processor. There will be web servers that extract it from mainframes. The mainframes won't end up being huge web serers but certainly reporistes of daa so users can extract, sot hta userswill thin its' coming off the mainframe. And they're a whole lot of reason wy.

Q. What is the future of SNA?

A. Most wouldn't have predicted SNA would have declined so quickly. I believe SNA will continue to decline, but I don't think it will be phased out completely. SNA has declined faster over the last year or so, and IP's acceptance is accelerating, but don't forget that customers have large investments in SNA-centric mainframe applications. Some of these applications require SNA in at least a small part of the network. I feel that SNA will still be around to address the legacy applications, but new applications will be IP-centric.

Q. Is Cisco more than a hardware company?

A. Generally a lot of people consider Cisco as a hardware company, and we do produce a lot of hardware. But what's interesting is that we have a large amount of investment in software. To give you an idea, take some voice-type companies that are considering adding IP functionality into some of the high-end switches. Feature-rich IP software is a significant investment, and we come to it with 10 years' worth of software development.

That job cannot be replicated overnight. In the last 10 years there has been a lot of coding done for IOS [Internetworking Operating System]. It would take three or four years for someone to catch up with us. Do users really care about network management products?

I think there is some validity to that question. It depends on the quality of the management tools - do they save time and diagnose errors? If they don't do that, the question is 100% correct.

Q. What happens after IP?

A. If I knew that, I'd be putting my money into companies that do whatever that is. Now I think a lot of people are talking about connectivity and applications and migration to IP. Where we go after that, say in two years' time? Everyone is now putting voice and video and data on IP.

Q. What can users expect in the future from Cisco?

A. Web enablement of the mainframe, lower prices for channel-attached routers, and we will be going after the IBM sysplex market with the CIP [Channel Interface Processor].

Entering the hostile IBM-Cisco world
Former IBM-Cisco exec Nick Francis looks at the competitive landscape. Network World, 9/8/97.

IBM to smooth IP, SNA integration
Network World, 8/18/97.

IBM, Cisco move backbone battle to the test labs
Network World, 8/18/97.

Bay to bolster big iron link to System 5000
Network World, 6/9/97.

Dissecting channel gateway performance
Tolly's view. Network World, 1/12/98.