There's plenty of unmined gold in the SNA to IP market, says Selby Wellman, the head of Cisco's newly reorganized and renamed InterWorks Business Division, IBD. His job is to develop the SNA to IP market and bolster Cisco's other units with research and development assistance. This past week, Wellman took some time to chat up the reorganization of the unit with Network World Senior Writer Marc Songini and Associate News Editor Michael Cooney.
Q. What's the high altitude view of the reorganization?
A. We've been pretty successful in the SNA to IP integration business segment we've been focused on for the past five years. We reached a crossroads about seven or eight months ago in our engineering. We had developed our position in APPN, the Channel Interface Processor (CIP), token ring and Data Link Switching (DSLw). Now we said, "What else could we do to penetrate this market?" If we wanted to continue to go further we had to get more into the client software side and maybe into the host software side.
We had done some partnering with other companies, Interlink for the IP stack on the mainframe, and OpenConnect for some client software that gave us access to the Web via Java applets. But those were other companies' products. We finally concluded that in the client side and host software side we would be better off partnering with a lot of different companies as opposed to doing more development there ourselves. We would keep the SNA team in one piece, but as engineering resources became available we would start to take on more development projects across all of Cisco.
From the marketing standpoint there will very little change. We still have long ways to go in terms of marketing and distribution to all the customers that are trying to get to IP with SNA. We still believe that market has a tremendous amount of revenue opportunity for Cisco, and we want to keep the product marketing very focused. It's no longer an issue about SNA to IP integration: it's really about dismantling SNA and moving to IP even faster.
Q. Will there be broad changes?
A. No major changes. I still head it up and we still have the same head of marketing, Frank Maly. There will be no change in personnel. A change in mission certainly and a name to explain the broadened mission. We will align with other divisions of the company across the board. We're doing some IOS development work. We're doing some WAN switching cards for some of our newer platforms. We're getting ready to embark on voice projects for some of our platforms. We've really aligned ourselves over the last year and half between enterprise service provider and the small and medium lines of business.
Q. Before the reorganization whose purview was this cross-company support under?
A. We didn't have such a thing. The IBU-SNA space was always held out to the side. We never put this business inside any of those lines of business because it was so unique.
Q. What would your message be to our readers?
A. It's not a departure from any of our commitment to the SNA space. But by our definition there will be no major research and development projects. The token ring switch market gets smaller by the day, and we (IBD) are the market leader there. I don't see any need to go on investing in a market that's disappearing. I can use those engineers to work on higher priority, higher market penetration things that we're after, particularly voice.
Q. You're working on migrating SNA to voice?
A. We had an engineering team working five years on [SNA to IP ]QoS, so it's a logical thing to have them working on it to integrate voice. The customers today that I'm talking to all see the integration of data voice and video in their future at some point in time. If you see integrated networking in your future around voice, clearly it will involve SNA and SNA data.
Q. Can you give us an idea of the IBU's contribution to Cisco financially?
A. I can tell you this: it's a big, big number.
Q. Is anything changing with your relationship with Interlink and OpenConnect?
A. I still sell those products - I don't want to develop my own software. When I look at the $300 billion data-voice-video convergence market, it doesn't make sense for me to invest R&D dollars into client software and host software, both of which are dominated by other companies. So we announced our Enterprise Associates program. Part of the program is where we certify and we do interoperability testing and to show our customers the products work in place together.
We believe the market for SNA to IP integration has only been penetrated 20%. If I have 80% of a 20% market, that's good, but I would much prefer to have 80% of an 80% market. That's big dollars.
