The business side of the coin. WAS RE: The market must be coming back

["Christopher J. Wolff" <chris () bblabs com>]

I recall that, early in my career I had the opportunity to build a new
LAN backbone for a 6 story office building.  It was going to be Category
5! Woohoo. With a 12/24 fiber backbone.

ATM in a LAN environment was new at the time but I was going to make
sure I had an OC3 backhauling each of the floors to a central switch.  I
thought this design was beautiful and marvelous.  There was a neat new
company that made LAN-style ATM gear with performance specs that would
just blow your mind.

So when I took the design to the board they loved the fastethernet fiber
blah blah and gave approval.  But when it came down to selecting vendors
for the hardware I ran right into a brick wall with questions like:

How long has this company been in business?
Are they using open standards?
Do they have knowldgeable tech support?
..and so on.  

So, regardless of whether the hardware is the fastest thing on the
block, pushing 10 nanobits at a megaflop, you can look like a fool if
you don't consider the business repercussions of the vendor you choose.
In the end, I didn't get my design approved until I chose Cisco.  Was I
pissed, sure!  Did I ship off white papers and other propaganda to
support my case? Yes!  But the company went bankrupt about 2 weeks after
I submitted the bid.

Just my .02,

Regards,
Christopher J. Wolff, VP CIO
Broadband Laboratories
http://www.bblabs.com
 


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog () merit edu [mailto:owner-nanog () merit edu] On Behalf Of
Gary
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 12:37 AM
To: Richard A Steenbergen
Cc: nanog () merit edu
Subject: RE: The market must be coming back



Richard:

> Personally I would say that Foundry does EVERYTHING less than perfect.

> Nearly everyone I'm aware of (including myself) who has had to 
> misfortune to try and use their devices in a service provider 
> environment and a layer 3 role has come away with a universal loathing

> of biblical proportions.

Not worth a response.  Can't please everybody and you CAN'T design
everyone's network for them.  Sort of like EIGRP.  Even the worst
network engineer can look great with it.  Perhaps you should read JANOG.
Maybe they can help you.  Search for フアウンドリ。 (note, if you cannot
read this, it is Japanese for Foundry in unicode).

> I really can't stress this enough, it DOES NOT MATTER how many 
> gigabits your box forwards. A router is ONLY as useful as the quality 
> of its software and support, if you can't login to it or have working 
> routing protocols, it's just a big paperweight. The only "wannabe 
> cisco" company I have seen learn this lesson is Juniper, and I am 
> firmly convinced this is the reason for their success in the core.

Juniper is an OUSTANDING company.  Much better than many networking
companies in many respects.  I've also heard nothing but good things
about Unisphere here in Japan, so perhaps this will be a good marriage
with benefits to service providers.  I'll enjoy competing.  We will
compete.

> Whenever I read a press release about Foundry in the core, I stop and 
> take a moment to laugh uncontrollably. It has nothing to do with ISIS 
> or MPLS, it has to do with making your existing functionality work 
> correctly and behave in a sensible fashion. Nothing personal against 
> Foundry, but the people in charge couldn't possibly "not get it" any 
> more than they do now.

Remember what you said in this paragraph.  I will refer to it later.

Yoroshiku,

Gary