HP, Cisco Take Networking Competition to VMworld 2012 -Charles King, Pund-IT - Aug. 2012
VMware made its play in SDN with the $1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira, a provider of network virtualization software. That isn’t a direct threat to network hardware vendors because it’s a software-only solution and customers will still need hardware to make SDN work, said Charles King, principal analyst at the research firm Pund-IT.
SDN is still in its nascent stage and there’s plenty of room for VMware, Cisco, HP and others to find their place in it, King said.
“In the same way that we’ve seen multiple hypervisors emerge for virtualizing servers, I imagine that there will be multiple network virtualization technologies out there,” he said.
“Networking is so critical to every part of what goes on in a data center that it makes sense for VMware to get in the middle of this and create a standard that it feels is in line with its customers’ needs.”
