The Cisco Live Milan week kicked off with the Cisco Developer Network day on Monday. We had a great preso from Steve Benvenuto of Cisco in the opening session. He zoomed in on two things: The first is how Cisco is working hard to turn around from relationships focussed on IT to relationships focussed on Line of Business (LOB). The second is how the sales organization now recognizes the deals leverage they get from partners.

Analysis internally has proven that the value of deals to Cisco increases by between 2 and 7 times when the right combination of partners is brought into the mix. Sales are under pressure to deliver. The temptation is to book orders early - for example by trying to close the Cisco side of a deal ahead of the partners. Steve explained that this can lead to the worst case - a complete loss of the sale.

In one of the breakout group sessions afterward, SPARKL presented the Sequencing Engine in a talk entitled “New Internet, New Router”. It plays well to the point Steve made about relating sales to customer line of business.

The SPARKL Sequencing Engine is all about basic business transaction types such as a bank trade, a product delivery or a customer call being made. This means it’s easy to talk to a customer about what the Sequencing Engine does and why they need it. All business people know what their business actually does, even if they’re completely in the dark about the technology. So even if the discussion gets to technical features of the Sequencing Engine (such as just-in-time provisioning and SDN topology management), it’s always in the context of some real objective the business customer understands.

One of the main benefits of these shows is that you get the time to wander about and meet interesting people you might miss otherwise. For example, there’s an interesting use case of the ONE Platform right opposite the SPARKL booth, where the Austrian firm NTS are showing their Quality-of-Service (QoS) definition tool.

This thing works by letting the user create a network policy across a bunch of routers - for example, a policy to prioritise traffic from one node to another. You can then apply that policy - which automatically propagates it across a bunch of routers so it takes immediate effect - and unapply it thus releasing any resources it may tie up.

This uses the OnePK API on supported routers to achieve its effect, but it’s basically manual through a UI. We had a great discussion about how with the SPARKL Sequencing Engine we can tie these useful, high-level policies to transactions - or even individual events within transactions. We went so far as to design the markup we’ll put into the engine config to make this happen.

So the Sequencing Engine makes these important QoS policies completely automatic - in the context of any transaction that’s executing. When the transaction finishes, or alternatively when the associated service is brought down, the QoS policy is also automatically torn down.

This is really nice, because it means we can say to a customer that certain policies will be applied automatically when the appropriate business-level transactions occur. It’s QoS with automatic lifecycle. Furthermore, we can point to the audit logs generated by SPARKL which provide the evidence that the policy was applied correctly - should the customer need to confirm that at some future date.

We’ve had a lot of people pass through the Cisco ONE Platform area in the show this week. Many of them are new to the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and most agree that although the possibilities seem endless, nobody is quite sure where it will lead.

Sure there’s the threat of change - for example, the threat posed to a primarily hardware-oriented supply-chain which may become commoditized - but there’s also opportunity.

We’ve done a lot of demos of transaction routing now, and one thing that’s coming out of it is that it’s a great use case for SDN. We hadn’t really anticipated this, thinking more that we’d need to explain transaction routing itself.

But it’s turned out the other way. People can understand what a transaction is. In our demos, we use a receipt of money needing to be posted to a bunch of ledgers.

The useful thing for several people has been that they see how the Sequencing Engine actually drives an SDN configuration, just in time. And that’s a great example of how SDN can be used in real life, rather than an abstract description of the capability.

So for us too this has been a really interesting and eye-opening event. Thanks to all the folks at Cisco who organized the Milan event, it’s been a real success and has helped guide a lot of people towards what the future of networking can be.

Image courtesy of Event Industry News