

Simplification is certainly among the top factors that make or break a product or service in IT these days. Docker, Inc. has been a huge success, because it makes application development and deployment accessible to people without a ton of expertise. Now some are looking at the container technology that made Docker the darling of the industry and applying it outside of applications.
Lauren Cooney, senior director of strategic programs, Chief Technology & Architecture Office, at Cisco Systems, Inc., said that within her company, they are exploring that possibility. “One of the things we’re looking at at Cisco is you can actually take network functions across the orchestration layer and containerize those,” she told John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.
“It’s actually a more scalable way to drive applications and services across platforms even at the networking level,” she said. The takeaway, she explained, is that the expertise bar for network functions could be significantly lowered by containerization, and thus networking could be the next area of IT to be “democratized.”
Cooney said that Cisco has made a big jump in open-source involvement — from three projects to 23 now. “And it’s across the company too,” she said. “Everyone wants to do open source, whether it’s submitting to GitHub, whether we’re actually donating code through foundations — there’s a lot of different things that we’re looking at doing.”
She added that Cisco has an open-source story unfolding within its own operations. “We’re looking at new ways to replace some products that may be proprietary with open solutions,” she said.
Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.
Support our open free content by sharing and engaging with our content and community.
Where Technology Leaders Connect, Share Intelligence & Create Opportunities
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation serving innovative audiences and brands, bringing together cutting-edge technology, influential content, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — such as those established in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology, and AI. .
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a powerful ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands, with a reach of 15+ million elite tech professionals. The company’s new, proprietary theCUBE AI Video cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.