Last week I was chatting with our CEO Steve Mullaney as he animatedly described the challenges he faces getting "traditional networking" people to understand what it is that Nicira does. He's not alone in this - I've heard similar things from CTO Martin Casado and Marketing VP Alan Cohen as well. In fact, it's probably no co-incidence that a large percentage of the engineering ranks at Nicira come from some field other than networking - distributed systems and operating systems people are especially well represented.
As reported by Computerworld and GigaOm last Friday, Sony’s entertainment division started to move some of its cloud services from (the now venerable) Amazon Web Services (AWS) to a Rackspace managed OpenStack environment. After some media flurry, Sony confirmed it will take advantage of a range of environments, including AWS and Rackspace. Sony joins a growing list of large enterprises that are taking advantage of the benefits of an OpenStack cloud.
During our launch, we asserted that network virtualization is the biggest transformation to the networking industry in a generation. We firmly believe that cloud computing changes technology and business, and network virtualization is the missing piece to achieving the promise of the cloud…the ability to truly deliver infrastructure and applications on-demand. This new paradigm is leveraging the physics of IT infrastructure in completely new ways to increase the velocity of business. Therein lies the transformation.
