* Nortel continues its arguments for a best-of-breed approach to networking
Last time, we heard from Nortel’s Tony Rybczynski, director strategic enterprise technologies, concerning the disadvantages of having a single-vendor network infrastructure. Today, we’ll continue with Rybczynski’s arguments: “Once again, let’s restate the question to further embrace reality: ‘Should you retain or move toward a single vendor vertically integrated Cisco network?’ We, and a growing number of customers, say ‘No’.
“Cisco promotes a vertically integrated ‘everything has to be in the network’ view. As a starter, this applies to VoIP, but the stakes are not just about linking dial-tone with the network. The whole industry is moving towards unified communications, which some define as ‘communications integrated to optimize business processes.’ This leads to the whole notion of communications enabling business processes to decrease human delay. This is truly transformational, but not if you go with a network-centric approach.
“Cisco has put a name on their vertically integrated approach: Service Oriented Network Architecture. Cisco’s SONA network-centric approach is diametrically opposed to Nortel’s approach. SONA creates interdependencies between the network infrastructure and applications – our software centric approach decouples communications and network services from the applications. SONA is single vendor – our approach to communications enablement is multivendor out of the gate. SONA is single domain – our approach is cross-domain including enterprise and carrier. The bottom-line is that Cisco’s SONA is a bottleneck to the communications enablement of applications, while an application software approach provides enterprises the agility to accelerate, rather than slow down, application innovation.
“‘Vertically integrated SONA’ clearly benefits Cisco as the dominant networking vendor. If you put all your reliance on Cisco for the network, for VoIP, for unified communications and for communications enablement of applications (where does it stop?), you have given up control of your future destiny to one vendor.
“Again, multi-vendor networking is and must be on the table to ensure your business needs are met. IP telephony and unified communications are becoming software applications that need to operate over a range of networks, including private and public, wired and wireless. Dual and multi-vendor strategies provide you the agility to avoid dependence on any one vendor, and to leverage new software technologies for business advantage as they emerge.”
Many thanks to both Nortel and Cisco for providing this thoughtful and thought-provoking series of Point-Counterpoint arguments. We’ll surely be continuing this discussion in the future.
