Application-first information technology is changing everything — compute, storage, development and operations. The network, however, is arriving a bit late for its application-first makeover. The best networking solution for the agile, multicloud world is going to win a lot of fans. Two heavyweight contenders are VMware Inc.’s NSX network virtualization and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Application Centric Infrastructure.

Organizations have got to slash the time it takes to change network configurations, according to Roland Acra (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Business Group at Cisco.

“Now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications,” he said. “Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on an hourly or daily basis.”

Cisco just announced ACI Anywhere. It provides the flexibility to move applications in multicloud seamlessly while maintaining security and high availability. It’s integrated with public-cloud giants Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure Corp.

Acra spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed Cisco’s new announcements and how they stack up against NSX. (* Disclosure below.)

ACI and NSX weigh in

Sun Microsystems co-founder and early Google investor Andy Bechtolsheim put his bets on NSX. There is no better networking solution available for multicloud, he said in an interview with theCUBE. “There isn’t anything even close,” he stated.

Acra’s answer to this is: Yes, there is — it’s called ACI. “It actually does a lot more. It has much more scope than NSX does,” he stated.

ACI is one system through which to manage the entire network — the overlay, the virtual view of the network that the applications apply to — and the underlay, the actual delivery system that ships packets from A to B with quality of service, etc.

It’s also integrated with every hypervisor, every management framework for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) and bare metal system on the planet, Acra explained. That’s going anywhere, he emphasized. 

“And our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability. It’s not bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware’s cloud strategy,” he said.

This fight is shaping up to go the full 12 rounds.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE