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The Battle of the Routers

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Cisco routerThere are several simultaneous forces tugging at companies like Cisco which make network routers. Cloud providers like Amazon and CloudFlare are successfully luring large businesses to move their IT functions from local routers to large data centers. Meanwhile, other companies like Facebook are pushing small cheap routers using open source software. But Cisco is fighting back with their push for fog computing which will place smaller function-specific routers near to the source of data at the edge.

Cloud Computing.

Companies like Amazon and CloudFlare have been very successful at luring companies to move their IT functions into the cloud. It’s incredibly expensive for small and medium companies to afford an IT staff or outsourced IT consultants, and the cloud is reducing both hardware and people costs for companies. CloudFlare alone last year announced that it was adding 5,000 new business customers per day to its cloud services.

There are several trends that are driving this shift to data centers. First, the cloud companies have been able to emulate with software what formerly took expensive routers at a customer’s location. This means that companies can get the same functions done for a fraction of the cost of doing IT functions in-house. The cloud companies are using simpler, cheaper routers that offer brute computing power which also are becoming more energy efficiency. For example, Amazon has designed all of the routers used in its data centers and doesn’t buy boxes from the traditional router manufacturers.

Businesses are also using this shift as an opportunity to unbundle from the traditional large software packages. Businesses historically have signed up for a suite of software from somebody like Microsoft or Oracle and would live with whatever those companies offered. But today there is a mountain of specialty software that outperforms the big software packages for specific functions like sales or accounting. Both the hardware and the new software are easier to use at the big data centers and companies no longer need to have staff or consultants who are Cisco certified to sit between users and the network.

Cheap Servers with Open Source Software.

Not every company wants to use the cloud and Cisco has new competition for businesses that want to keep local servers. Just during this last week both Facebook and HP announced that they are going to start marketing their cheaper routers to enterprise customers. Like most of the companies today with huge data centers, Facebook has developed its own hardware that is far cheaper than traditional routers. These cheaper routers are brute-force computers stripped of everything extraneous and that have all of their functionality defined by free open source software; customers are able to run any software they want. HP’s new router is an open source Linux-based router from their long-time partner Accton.

Cisco and the other router manufacturers today sell a bundled package of hardware and software and Facebook’s goal is to break the bundle. Traditional routers are not only more expensive than the new generation of equipment, but because of the bundle there is an ongoing ‘maintenance fee’ for keeping the router software current. This fee runs as much as 20% of the cost of the original hardware annually. Companies feel like they are paying for traditional routers over and over again, and to some extent they are.

These are the same kinds of fees that were common in the telecom industry historically with companies like Nortel and AT&T / Lucent. Those companies made far more money off of maintenance after the sale than they did from the original sales. But when hungry new competitors came along with a cheaper pricing model, the profits of those two companies collapsed over a few years and brought down the two largest companies in the telecom space.

Fog Computing.

Cisco is fighting back by pushing an idea called fog computing. This means having limited-function routers on the edge of the network to avoid having to ship all data to some remote cloud. The fog computing concept is that most of the data that will be collected by the Internet of Things will not necessarily need to be sent to a central depository for processing.

As an example, a factory might have dozens of industrial robots, and there will be monitors that constantly monitor them to spot troubles before they happen. The local fog computing routers would process a mountain of data over time, but would only communicate with a central hub when they sense some change in operations. With fog computing the local routers would process data for the one very specific purpose of spotting problems, which would save the factory-owner from paying for terabits of data transmission, while still getting the advantage of being connected to a cloud.

Fog computing also makes sense for applications that need instantaneous feedback, such as with an electric smart grid. When something starts going wrong in an electric grid, taking action immediately can save cascading failures, and microseconds can make a difference. Fog computing also makes sense for applications where the local device isn’t connected to the cloud 100% of the time, such as with a smart car or a monitor on a locomotive.

Leave it Cisco to find a whole new application for boxes in a market that is otherwise attacking the boxes they have historically built. Fog computing routers are mostly going to be smaller and cheaper than the historical Cisco products, but there is going to be a need for a whole lot of them when the IoT becomes pervasive.



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