Soni Jiadani, senior vice president at Cisco stopped by theCube at VMware 2011 going on right now to discuss her company, and the IT industry as a whole (full video below).

First of all, she started out by mentioning Cisco’s announcements from the conference.  The networking giant’s USC platform won the VMware benchmark for the second consecutive year, and the two companies unveiling the Virtual Extensible LAN, developed with collaboration with several other partners.  The new protocol is designed to be the next gen VLAN, enabling automation for server and network scalability, as well as scalability and mobility  needed to support virtual apps, according to Jiandani.

From here, the topic shifted to the open-source cloud.  She said that open standards are the key for the industry to build offerings around improved performance and scalability, as well as to solve vendor lock-ins and manageability issues.  Open-standards can also help enterprises retain their investment, she continued, saying that Cisco is offering infrastructure to support this movement. Jiandani’s take on the market is that the hardware is adapting to virtualization, and protocols and network services need to do the same.

One of the ways the networking firm will be leveraging the protocol is by extending physical firewall offering to the virtual space.

When asked how her company innovates and generates its revenue, she expanded the discussion to what is an industry wide trend: Industry standards, open-source hypervisors and operating systems are essential for companies to allow automation without walking away from their existing model.

“That is the key element that we in the IT sector always straddle: How do you drive innovation while standardizing, and offering the customer the choice of openness. It continues to be done in our industry, especially with the market moving so rapidly in this direction.”

The last part of the interview focused on some of the history and outlook of USC and Cisco. Jiandani, who was a member of one of the original development teams behind the platform, described the doubts the offering will be able to drive value in a world of commodity. She also said that going forward, Cisco will be working on fiber computing, rather than offerings software and hardware companies like IBM, Intel and Oracle are already focusing on.


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