Many years ago I found myself talking to venture capitalists about the differences between SaaS, outsourcing, ASPs, MSPs, online applications; etc. Also I noticed that my Stanford students had little understanding of the economics of software, so I developed the idea of seven business models to cover everything in the software business, and remove the buzzwords and replace them with economic models.

In my previous blog post we discussed the first four models, this post will cover Models Five through Seven.

We ended the last blog talking about Model Four being able to provide management of the security, availability, performance and change of the software at nearly 10x less cost.

The question we left with was “how”?

How is it possible to decrease the cost of management without just paying people a fraction of what they made previously?

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Tags: business models, CIO, Cloud Computing, isv, on-premise, open source, outsourcing, SaaS

Many years ago I found myself talking to a venture capitalist about the differences between SaaS, outsourcing, ASPs, MSPs, online applications; etc. Also I noticed that my Stanford students had little understanding of the economics of software, so I developed the idea of seven business models to cover everything in the software business, remove the buzzwords and replace them with economic models.

In my previous post, I talked about the Seven Ways to Move to the Cloud. In the second issue (there’s a lot here), I’ll break this into two separate posts, discussing models one through four here, and models five through seven in the next issue publishing on Monday, March 2.

Note the dollar numbers used throughout are intended to be relatively representative.

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Tags: business models, CIO, Cloud Computing, on-premise, open source, outsourcing, SaaS

A little more than a year ago when Sourcefire became a part of Cisco, we reaffirmed our commitment to open source innovation and pledged to continue support for Snort and other open source projects. Our announcement of the OpenAppID initiative earlier this year was one of several ways we have delivered on this promise.

Today we are announcing the alpha release of a new Snort 3.0 architecture. This alpha release builds on several ideas that were part of the original 3.0 prototype developed several years ago and goes well beyond those initial concepts.

Snort 3.0 expands on the extensible architecture users have come to know and includes several new capabilities that make it easier for people to learn and run Snort. We encourage you check out it out at www.snort.org, give us your feedback and help us build a strong foundation for the future. As Joel mentions in his post, this is a very early release that is intended for community feedback more than anything else.

When I first began building Snort, I architected it so that we could continue to extend it over time. By working with the Snort community, it quickly evolved from the initial primitive idea of an easy-to-use intrusion detection engine to the powerful traffic analysis and control capabilities we have today. With millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of registered users, Snort is the most widely deployed IPS technology in the world and has become the standard for intrusion detection and prevention. Snort is also the foundation of Cisco’s Next-Generation IPS and is one of the core technologies that cemented Sourcefire’s position as a leader in the security industry.

Cisco understands the power of open source and how it can help customers solve tough challenges. In the coming months you’ll hear more from us about Snort 3.0 and our continued efforts to deliver meaningful capabilities that underscore this commitment.

Tags: open source, security, Snort

Yesterday on stage at Cisco Collaboration Summit, I demonstrated an industry first – the first non-transcoded video call between a webRTC application and an existing video endpoint.

Why is this significant? WebRTC is an exciting new technology, enabling real-time voice and video calling natively in the browser. Up until now WebRTC-enabled applications have not been able to connect to existing video collaboration gear that companies may own, from room systems to desktop video endpoints.

Today, Cisco has broken the barriers that previously prevented browser-based collaboration from connecting with existing video hardware. Companies that have invested in video collaboration can now extend that collaboration to the browser, enabling their users to collaborate from anywhere, at any time.

Yesterday, Andreas Gal, the CTO of Mozilla, joined me on stage. He called a simple SIP URI on a Cisco video endpoint, which instantly rang my Project Squared client running in Firefox. By leveraging WebRTC and Cisco’s OpenH264 binary module integrated into Firefox, we had a great voice and video call, without  plugins, complex and cumbersome browser downloads, or expensive transcoding gear in the cloud. Check out a demo of what we did onstage here:

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Tags: Cisco, collaboration, collaboration summit, firefox, H.264, open source, Project Squared, WebRTC

As the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meets in Hawaii (IETF 91), the unavoidable question for both participants and observers is whether a Standards Development Organization (SDO) like the IETF is relevant in a rapidly expanding environment of Open Source Software (OSS) projects.

For those new to the conversation, the open question is NOT whether SDOs should exist.  They are a political reality inexorably tied to trade policies and international relationships.  The fundamental reason behind their existence is to avoid a communications Tower of Babel (with the resulting economic consequences) and establish governance over the use of global commercial and information infrastructure (not just acceptable behavior, but the management of resources like addressing as well).  Rather, the question is about their role going forward in enabling innovation. 

SDO Challenges

SDOs (like the IETF) have to evolve their processes Read More »

Tags: API, carrier ethernet, ietf, network function virtualization, Open Loop, open source, Open Stack, open standards, OSS, SDN NFV, SDO, service providers, software defined network, yang