Network Break 60: Cisco’s Acquisitions, Verizon’s IoT Ambitions

Comments: 3

1. 

   JMAX on November 2nd, 2015 - 10:07pm

   Greg do you believe Cisco is acquiring smaller players to sell itself later down the road? They are buying for building them self for a sale on the market like EMC.

   Reply
2. 

   Steven Iveson on November 4th, 2015 - 9:51am

   Guys, so much to say about this show, both good and bad. Either way, thanks.

   You have my vote for a show on IoT; based on zero research (other than following @internetofshit on Twitter) I just don’t get it. In the consumer space it’s just another privacy busting, poorly secured door wedge into your life, in the commercial space, well, it’s more network connected sensors, big deal. No doubt just as insecure as most consumer products. Long live NAT, until IPv6 becomes the cheaper/easier solution (no doubt leading to even more insecurity).

   Carrier moves in this space are no surprise, they have been trying to ‘add value’ to shifting circuits and packets forever, usually at great and confusion cost to the customer. Drew made some very good and clear points around this. The carriers lost the commodity battle years ago with voice services and simply charge ridiculously high prices for data to maintain income, without offering any value or differentiation. I’m not sure why Greg thinks there’s still a battle to be won when the war is over. I’d hope the data cash cow will be slaughtered by regulators in due course, but not soon enough of course.

   Talking of carriers, your discussion around privacy, CISA and other regulation just makes any remaining trickle of kindness towards carriers evaporate. It’s not their fault but hey, I intensely dislike them already and now they have been transformed into data and communications collection infrastructures for the government. Great thoughts from all of you.

   It’s not ‘security data’ by the way, who came up with that one? It’s the communications data (i.e content) and metadata of private citizens. I loved the related news regarding the ex-NSA man, just perfectly designed to destroy all trust and prove there’s a rather special them and an equally worthless us.

   Completely disagree with Greg around his ‘we all need computer science degrees’ meme. I find this surprisingly offensive and surely there are other in the audience that do too. If nothing else (considering Greg has yet to provide any evidence for his reasoning) it seems rather counter to the multi-level abstractions being introduced with contemporary applications, network based or otherwise. I almost see the opposite problem; the need for skill and original thought is being removed; things are being dumbed down.

   Sure, there’s a large number of people in the industry unwilling to change and adapt and who have been forced down a technical dead end. Yes, fundamental skills are more important than CLI syntax; Cisco is not networking. Networking is outdated and slow. None of that is a good argument for a cs degree, or programming skills. An appetite to learn, continuous learning and improvement, an open mind and attitude – these are essential.

   Cheers

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3. 

   R on March 1st, 2016 - 8:19pm

   I disagree that unloading governing tasks from the government onto business decreases the size of government. Bureaucracies never shrink voluntarily, but the actual effect is that the business with all its overhead becomes part of the government. If you aren’t paying for it with taxes, then you are paying with fees and decreased efficiencies.

   Reply