Is Cisco vulnerable to open source?
The point is that while Cisco is a good corporate citizen it is not a friend of open source. (West Coast Signworks makes this and other dimensional logos.)
Could that now make it vulnerable? Vyatta insists it does. Unlike past open source networking start-ups, Vyatta has the money and marketing savvy to make a game of it.
At the heart of the pitch is the idea that you don't need specialized gear to do networking. Commodity hardware will work fine, the company says.
At the heart of Vyatta is VC4, a Linux-based networking system the company claims offers better performance than Cisco gear at a fraction of the price.
Early, pre-release views are ecstatic. You have VPN support, QOS functionality, even traffic-shaping. Download it here.
Like many open source companies Vyatta has both community and subscription versions. VC4, in fact, is short for Vyatta Community. This is not just important to Vyatta, but to the market it seeks to serve.
Even if phone companies subscribe to open source code, they still want to keep their proprietary tweaks. Most won't go anywhere near a product with out a sales contract. Vyatta lets them do this.
The reality of the carrier market is that today it consists almost entirely of incumbents. Fortunately there remains an immense and growing corporate market, Intranets running telecomm services and Web 2.0 companies offer that market.
This is Vyatta's sweet spot. Whether it can really build a community is less important than whether it can build a sales channel.
If it can, Cisco will face its first real market threat in a decade.