* Vendor disagreement
Both Jim and Steve moderate a lot of vendor panels. In most cases, the vendors go out of their way to be polite to each other, making comments like “I agree with my esteemed colleague and would like to add one small point.”
That was not the case last week at Interop in New York. Jim moderated a panel on branch office optimization where the panelists sometimes agreed but often sharply disagreed with each other on some key issues. The last newsletter discussed the two areas where the panelists were generally in agreement.
This newsletter will discuss some of the many areas where they were not in agreement.
The five vendors on the panel were Cisco, Exinda, Riverbed, Expand and Ipanema. One of the areas of disagreement was the issue of whether or not WAN optimization should be integrated into the router or performed in a separate device. Since this is the subject of a number of our ongoing newsletters, we will not say anything else about that topic in this newsletter other than to point out that Cisco and Expand were the only panelists to state that WAN optimization should be done in the router.
However, neither vendor made the statement that WAN optimization always belonged in the router. Rather, they both took the approach of identifying times when WAN optimization should be integrated into the router and times when it should not be.
Another area of disagreement was sparked by a question from an attendee. He asked the panelists if their company’s products could support remote workers who were not in a branch office, but working from a location such as a home or a hotel room. This was a very timely question as vendors have just begun to offer products to support these remote workers. Of the panelists whose company’s products support remote users, the primary disagreement was about the best approach – should there be a software client on the user’s PC or not.
A minor skirmish occurred when Riverbed declared that all of the other vendors were using 10-year-old technology to solve current problems and that this technology was just not appropriate. As you might guess, a number of the vendors, most notably Exinda, disagreed that their technology was 10-years-old and irrelevant.
The most heated disagreement, however, was around the use of tunnels and what this means for transparency. Cisco made a statement that some vendor products use tunneling and that this approach breaks things. This was a not so subtle jab at Riverbed whose products use tunneling. Riverbed’s response was that their tunneling approach is the right approach and that alternative approaches can cause data to be misdelivered. Cisco was not the only vendor that disagreed with Riverbed. Ipanema also challenged Riverbed’s comment on misdelivered data.
The session was certainly animated. We don’t know if the session served to help any of the attendees choose a solution, but it certainly helped the attendees understand that there are some real differences among the solutions.
Editor’s note: Starting Nov. 19 week, you will notice a number of enhancements to Network World newsletters that will provide you with more resources and more news links relevant to the newsletter’s subject. Beginning Monday, Nov. 12, the Wide Area Networking Newsletter, written by Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, will be merged with the WAN News Alert and will be named the Wide Area Networking Alert. You’ll get Steve and Jim’s analysis of the convergence and WAN market, which you will be able to read in full at NetworkWorld.com, plus links to the day’s WAN news and other relevant resources. This Alert will be mailed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We hope you will enjoy the enhancements and we thank you for reading Network World newsletters.
