VMware's planned acquisition of Nicra for $1.25 billion represents the evolution of networking beyond the hardware-dominated point of view that has sustained the industry for decades. On the same day Cisco (s csco) said it would cut 2 percent of its workforce,VMware (s vmw) said it would spend roughly 20 percent of its cash buying a networking startup with around 100 employees.
Interesting indeed, the shift is just not on the vendor side but the enterprise side. It has been difficult enough to move from silo network and server operations to integrated teams that understand the relationship between the hypervisor based network device and the physical network device. The Nexus 1000 and OpenSwitch helps but when it comes down to serious trouble shooting there’s a lot of finger pointing in the current environment.
VMware needs to help tell this story to the enterprise. The Google’s and Facebook’s of the world already understand how to build teams that can work cross platform. But try selling this concept to the frontline managers. If you go into your average IT Manager’s office even in the largest of enterprise and you will get a blank look when you talk SDN. Even as enterprises start to move existing datacenter workloads to the cloud there will be a need to retrain existing server and network operations to understand the other side.
