The Intel acquisition of McAfee is about a transformation taking place within IT and pending collisions between devices, networks and systems. 

At the core of this transformation is a massive shift from personal computers to network-enabled devices (smart phones, tablets, etc); a shift that will be even more disruptive than the shift from mainframes to personal computers.

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VMware is poised to establish itself as a premier tech powerhouse, the likes which haven’t been seen since the PC crashed the mainframe party.  This leads me to a question posed by a recent phone call earlier with a financial analyst: Will VMware become the next Microsoft or the next Netscape?

The following is inspired by our conversational answer to his question:

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The network industry could be entering yet another new stage of innovation and growth, fueled by a flood of new demands and an increasingly likely new tech refresh cycle driven by increasing network infrastructure automation and control. 

At the core of this new cycle is a flood of new devices being attached to the network, and at an unprecedented pace.  Connectivity, or the ability for a network to recognize what is attached, becomes critical as technology users accumulate IP addresses like children building Pokémon decks.

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This bog is inspired by a pair of recent blogs from Interop and Infoblox's recent acquisition of Netcordia.

If you drew a triangle and placed Cisco, Microsoft and VMware, respectively, at each corner you would have a good idea of where the center of power is regarding the future direction of the IT industry and the emergence of cloud computing.  And plenty of well-heeled tech companies would love to keep this status quo in tact for as long as possible, simply because they’ve run out of steam and are counting on complexity and lock-in to postpone the revolution.

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While virtualization has automated systems, the network has continued to be operated, delivered like a flashback to 70s era management practices.  Last year here at FIRE we heard from leaders in networking and virtualization about how enterprise networks were wholly unprepared to deliver on the promise of cloud computing or IT automation.  There were too many manual constraints.  That’s right, the network automating the business had done a poor job of automating itself, and the result was growing gaps between new demands (more IP addresses, more change, more new initiatives) and policies and practices that have been around for decades. 

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