It’s interesting to know that Incrementalism exists. It is more interesting still to understand the costs – both explicit and hidden – of an industry where Incrementalism is so prevalent. But if we really want to move forward, we probably need to understand why Incrementalism is so pervasive in the first place.
The Internet Boom marked a massive explosion of growth that led to a lot of companies being founded, which in turn attracted a ton of young talent into the industry. The issue is that when everything imploded, the collateral damage went well beyond companies like Pets.com and Worldcom. With corporate growth muted and the hype essentially gone, the networking industry was no longer capable of turning the brightest young minds into multi-millionaires. The result? We essentially locked the networking industry up in a time capsule.
Sure, the people who had come and survived were among the brightest in any industry. But the source of new innovation is new ideas. And with a largely insular group of individuals driving the bulk of the advancements, the ideas simply didn’t continue. After MPLS, the industry pretty much went dark for a decade.
For some, that statement alone is enough to elicit a strong response. But the bulk of the innovation over the past decade has been derivative work. A new protocol. Maybe some extension to an existing protocol to allow for higher availability. This acronym or that acronym. It’s all incremental.
Since then, while the Internet has been booming with video and mobile devices, the burgeoning business that ought to come with it has actually been deflected away from the networking vendors and towards the Googles and Netflixes and Facebooks of the world. Without an attractive financial draw, the young talent has been lost to the over-the-top players. And this has left the networking industry with beards that are graying and growing but rarely being refreshed.
We talk about how small the world is, but Silicon Valley is even smaller. And the networking industry is downright tiny. We all know each other, either personally or at least by reputation. The relationship between the vendors is somewhat incestuous, to the point that everyone has worked for everyone. We all know what the other companies are doing; there are no secrets anymore. It means we are all executing against the same basic ideas, and without an injection of new thinking, those ideas are all incremental.
Academia figured this out a long time ago. This is why you have to leave and do work somewhere else before you can return to your college. New ideas require exposure to new things and new interactions. Failing that, you advance the same tired ideas. This is dead obvious in the university system, and yet we seem to plainly ignore it within the networking vendor community.
Along comes SDN.
If you want to get past the incrementalist way of doing things, you need to bring new ideas. New ideas require new talent. The best thing that SDN is doing is that it is exciting the investing universe, and that is bringing dollars from the sidelines back into networking. Those dollars will attract new talent, and that talent will bring new ideas.
One of the most important things to happen in the past several years? When VMWare bought Nicira, the biggest impact wasn’t that it set two giants on a collision course (Cisco and EMC). No, what that did was bring a new kind of talent into the networking world – people who didn’t spend the last 20 years in networking. The new people and their new ideas – those will be the lasting impacts of that acquisition.
The networking industry is on fire right now with new companies. As you navigate those companies (and their SDN strategies), how do you sort it all out? Look to see how they got started. It’s a good bet that if it’s the same bunch of people – with beards greying and growing – you can almost predict the outcome. If you want a different outcome, you need a different starting point. That’s actually why I came to Plexxi.
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