Good managers influence; Great leaders inspire!

I watched Simon Sinek's TED talk video of "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" and it immediately reminded me of an unforgettable personal learning experience I have had.

Many years ago, I hired a young engineer into my team.  He became a star player very quickly and delivered amazing results with all the complex problems I threw at him.  When one day he asked me what he could improve, the only thing I was able to tell him was to talk to customers and figure out more customer pain points.

Unfortunately, he resigned before long.  He told me that he was thankful to my great impact to this first job he had but he wanted to work for a company with a household name that his Mom knows.  In case you are laughing -- he was the very first attrition I ever had as a manager!  I don't know about others but I was completely devastated when I lost a person from my team for the first time and not to mention here's a star engineer.  It was truly a big sad deal to me personally!

I finally asked him a question point blank, "what made you to start thinking about a new job?"  He looked at me and said something I would never forget for the rest of my career. "Howie, remember you told me in our 1x1 to spend more time in talking to customers. But I'm just a programmer, I don't understand why it is my job to talk to customers and I'm afraid I could not live up to your expectation.  Just when I felt I was a bit lost, a good friend from Apple called me."

Wow... An engineer became vulnerable for another job because I was merely telling him "what" to do, and apparently did not connect/resonate with him on the "why" in his heart.  As a result, he became less certain and less engaged.   Certainly this experience profoundly changed how I engage with my team for years to come.

Many years later, I am watching Simon's TED talk and like his wisdom so much -- don't hire those people who can do the job but hire those who believe what you believe; inspiring leaders communicate with people on the purpose, belief, and cause first and foremost, and then the tactical "what" and "how".

Had I learned much earlier this one difference between managers who influence ("what" and "how") vs. leaders who inspire ("why"), perhaps there would have been one less devastated person on the planet? :)

Anniversary Reflection Chap 2: "Cloud First" Transformation

First off, Cisco's President Rob Lloyd announced today a number of Intercloud related news that my team has been working on last year:

• Rob announced more than 30 new partners have been added for Cisco's InterCloud platform. The new partners include BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, and Equinix, and collectively bring 250 data centers in 50 countries.
• Rob also announced the General Availability of Intercloud Fabric, a game-changing technology that enables seamless, secure workload mobility between public and private clouds—the foundation for hybrid cloud management. 

Secondly, some more colors about my own Intercloud Fabric engineering journey at Cisco.

• To the external audience, the both simple and complex problem my team is solving:
• On one hand, CIOs are unequivocally saying "I want cloud", but on the other hand CSOs are telling CIOs "slow down".
• Intercloud Fabric is giving the peace of mind, visibility, control, and compliance back to the CSOs/CIOs, so that their journey towards a Hybrid Cloud can truly be accelerated.  A CTO from one of the top Fortune 500 (cannot say the name but it is synonymous to the copy machine) told us, "I can now migrate my data center in 6 months instead of 2 years."
• To the internal audience, the very transformation my team is going through:
• Just like a few other very successful hi-tech companies are going through, we would not have gone to where we are today and will not reach where we want to get to next few years without transforming our own engineering team.  
• It is a challenging but very rewarding exercise.  The priorities and skillset requirements for the engineering tasks are morphing, the user experience expectation is changing very quickly, the R&D model needs to be a lot more "agile", and ultimately a "Cloud First" model.

Lastly, it is a humbling experience to see a semi-skunkworks project grow into the top initiative within Cisco and the entire industry.   This is precisely why I'm so passionate and proud of my team -- they are truly delivering something amazing that is making a profound impact to the entire cloud ecosystem.

Container Disrupting or Complementing VM?

Virtual Machine (VM) is the first class object within contemporary enterprise data center.  There have been great debates on whether Container "marks the death knell for virtualization" or is at the peak of "Gartner Hype Cycle".

My former VMware colleague Kit Colbert posted an insightful and educational blog on why VM and Container are "better together".  I very much agree with Kit that VM technology is complementing Container technology for now in many use cases, especially for those users who want to enjoy a cutting edge technology without sacrificing enterprise grade manageability/security/ecosystem.

However the billion question still remains -- whether in the long run Container could disrupt VM within Data Center?

Let's first look at VM vs. Windows, as they were "better together" but things have changed significantly.

• A decade ago, Windows had quite comprehensive management story and far more better IHV/ISV ecosystem; VM/Hypervisor world offered little more than a "cool technology".   VM and Windows were "better together" because majority of the workloads were Windows friendly and VM was a great "passenger seat" tool. 
• A decade later, VM/Hypervisor has disrupted Windows Server by commanding the "driver seat" in Private Cloud build-up.  Hypervisor is now a strategic data center control point than a "cool technology".

I believe Container has the same potential to disrupt the VM in the next decade just like VM disrupted Windows.

• From technology perspective, Container has the potential to offer far more computing efficiency and agility. For instance, a few early adopter hosting providers are seeing 10x more density/efficiency in their environment (VM is an overkill for the type of services they provide and VM is in the way to do optimal "bin packing"). 
• From ecosystem perspective, Container land enjoys some unbelievable developer attention right now.  I was shocked to see 7,000 projects on dockers in less than a year, and that number is already way outdated by the time of this blog. I also see the industry started giving attention to bare metal provisioning (e.g., Project Ironic) too.
• From enabling new/exciting use case perspective, Container has the potential to allow users to get the better part of both Bare Metal machines and Virtual Machines. VMs offer great mobility, portability, and agility to the server workload today, but applications have lost the direct control and optimal use of the hardware. If the Bare Metal based Container technology can offer the same mobility/portability/agility PLUS the same rich ISV/IHV ecosystem PLUS the fact the new mobile-cloud era applications can take great/real advantage of controlling the hardware directly, then the ubiquitous nature of VM can be challenged at that point.

Obviously a LOT is yet to happen to make the Container disruption closer to real and transform Container from a "cool technology" to an "turnkey solution", we cannot claim the certainty of this disruption at this point.

The other night, my new friend Flo Leibert (CEO/Founder of Mesosphere) showed me his latest toy to help applications to easily specify real computing power needs (cycles, scheduling, locality, etc etc, rather than sandbagging big time in VM provisioning to compensate the virtualization indirection).   It is really hard for me to deny the amazing potential for the application focused Container technology to disrupt the x86 abstraction focused VM technology in the next decade with so much great work out of Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphsere...

The debate on Container will go on with or without my blog, but again the ultimate fate really depends on the execution of the Container industry next few years … :)

Anniversary Reflection Chap 1: Nexus 1000V "Better Than Better"

I reached my anniversary at Cisco this month.:-)

Thanks to the amazing accomplishment of the 300+ talented engineers in my team, there is so much for me to reflect upon last year's journey.


The first installment of my reflection is on the Nexus 1000V (N1KV) product.  This product has a special position in my heart because I helped to build it up from ground up years ago when I was running the networking product team at VMware.  I will talk about other fantastic products from my team in the next few blogs.

N1KV has 10,000 customers already and last year my team gave a complete facelift for this product, mainly focusing on simplicity, scalability, and SDN functionality.

• Awesome operational simplicity is achieved by abstracting out tons of traditional networking operational complexity into simple "container" like workflow.
• Customers can now leverage Virtual Switch Update Manager (VSUM) to install or upgrade N1KV with a few mouse clicks without having to read pages and pages of manual, and better yet the new process is a lot less error prone.
• Customers can also leverage Virtual Application Container Services (VACS) to set up application centric network policies with a few mouse clicks too, without having to learn all the Cisco product details including N1KV, VSG, PNSC, CSR 1000V, how all of them work together, how to install and configure them individually, etc etc..  Instead, admins can truly "do more with less" and have a peace of mind even when dealing with complex network add/remove/change requirements.
• Scalability of N1KV has got a huge boost too. 
• Some of the world's largest private cloud build-outs have already been leveraging N1KV but some of them want to run 1K+ ports on each physical server, and some want to have 10K+ ports per (VSM) controller domain.  We now have solutions to support this kind of scale.
• More importantly, we support the above large scale while supporting full N1KV switching and security features.  This level of "full feature" scalability is unmatched by any other products in the market even though they might advertise similar or even higher scale numbers for the vanilla case.
• Richer SDN functionality.
• Customers can now extend ACI policies to vSphere hypervisor which is a big deal to many of the ACI adopters.  
• When other products in the industry started to implement micro-segmentation in a virtualized environment, we have already advanced our product to the next generation so that the micro-segmentation applies to both virtual and physical workloads in a seamless manner.  

On top of the simplicity, scalability, and functionality, my team have also expanded the same vSphere N1KV product to cover KVM/OpenStack and Hyper-V land too so that customers can now manage the virtualized data center networking with heterogeneous hypervisor types under one consistent tool.  We are going to land N1KV in the container land next! :)

Exciting time for N1KV technology and exciting time for SDN industry as well!!

-howie
PS:  I'm looking forward to talking about this product family with customers, partners, and analysts this week at VMworld in San Francisco.

"Facebook Switch" debut today -- just another server!

First "Hardware-less" Cisco Live

When Cisco's EVP/CDO Pankaj Patel finished the final keynote speech at Cisco Live last week, I could not help telling him that it is the first Cisco Live without any "boxes" on keynote stage! :)

I was one of the original then-VMware persons who brought up the concept of Cisco being a "network mainframe" company.   Let me say one thing however: it is actually an amazing accomplishment for both IBM and Cisco to be able to deliver complex computing and networking functionality and make the technology to "just work" in a mainframe form factor.   The only question is what's next after achieving this "mainframe status"?

Imagine if IBM had evolved S/360 mainframe into something that is easy to use, pay-as-you-go, flexible to access from anywhere, available and intuitive to be used by more than the elite few IT'ish folks, with open API and an open ecosystem, would IBM have lost the king of computing title quickly?  Today's "cloud" is essentially a large scale S/360 PLUS all the flexibility and XaaS "enhancement". IBM got trapped in the "innovator dilemma" unfortunately.

Cisco, on the other hand, is motivated to re-invent itself despite the tremendous success thus far.  Cisco's willingness/motivation to disrupt itself is a reason I joined Cisco last summer.  I'm glad that I am able to help to drive some of the most exciting new technologies highlighted at Cisco Live, including ACI and Intercloud.  Also happy to see that Cisco articulated a balanced, not a religious, approach between hardware vs. software, custom ASIC vs. merchant ASIC, on-prem vs. off-prem vs. hybrid cloud.

There is still a long way to go, for Cisco and the entire networking industry, to deliver comprehensive Cloud and SDN era networking benefits, but I was certainly excited to sit in a "hardware-less" keynotes audience. :)

flipping mission critical infrastructure vs. swapping mobile phones

Goldman issued a very interesting report this week on SDN battle between Cisco and VMware.  There is one thing I like the report and one thing I "dislike" it (personal view point only, absolutely no representation of my employer):

• I like the linkage that Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX is like iPhone vs. Android-Phone.  
• For one thing Cisco has owned "IOS" for decades but kidding aside, Cisco (ACI) provides customers an integrated vertical seamless solution.  VMware (NSX) provides customers more choice in hardware but nothing end-to-end from networking solution perspective.

• My Cisco colleagues often remind me networking protocols are open for decades, from Ethernet to BGP.  It is very true, but unfortunately the perception on the street is Cisco is a closed solution company.  I am hopeful that the recent intro of the OpFlex policy model and work in open source community including OpenStack will help to change the perception.

• I hope the assumption that "Cisco will garner about 30% market share in its SDN infrastructure software served addressable market by 2018" is not true however.  Why not 60% or more for Cisco?  
• There will continue to be differentiation in hardware, but I cannot imagine Cisco will be the dominant networking company if it only has 30% of the SDN market shares 5 years from now.  There is frankly a tremendous amount of work Cisco needs to do to get out of the comfort zone of selling boxes, starting from having a sense of paranoia.
• It is a huge uphill battle VMware needs to fight in order to convince enterprise customers to swap infrastructure just like some of them flipped Apple's iPhone to Samsung's Galaxy, because the switch cost and potential damage is too high.

I know my Android geek friends may laugh at me but I am a big Apple iOS fan as I have the peace of mind that someone else has thought through the end-to-end story, user experiences, and tested a heck out of it.  This is why I appreciate SDN products that e2e physical and virtual networking troubleshooting and visibility is designed in on day 1.