Mavericks invent future Internet where Cisco is meaningless

April 17, 2012 | Source: Wired

Silicon Valley startup Nicira wants to make Cisco irrelevant, taking the brains out of network hardware and moving them into software, to provide a far easier way of building and modifying and rebuilding the networks that run the largest services on the web and beyond, using “software-defined networking” (SDN).

The Nicira platform is already used by AT&T, eBay, Japanese telecom NTT, financial giant Fidelity, and Rackspace.  The platform is so attractive to these companies because today’s hardware networks are ridiculously difficult to modify.