Cisco and Composite

The folks at BBBT (the Boulder BI Brains Trust) organised a briefing with Cisco/Composite last week. This was interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as Bob Eve mentioned, data virtualisation vendors tend to minimise the network – the network is seen to be the ultimate bottleneck. So, what happens when a company that lives in the network (Cisco) starts playing with data virtualisation? Are there places where you could actually exploit the network to improve performance? The idea is at least plausible though Cisco was not going into any details or even suggesting that this was something that we might see anytime soon.

More broadly, Cisco was talking about the Internet of Everything (things plus people) and the potential connectedness of everything, which I don’t mean in any metaphysical sense. So, the company’s argument is that this why it has acquired Composite: to enable these connections.

This rationale clearly makes sense but it doesn’t convince me that we will still see Composite in its traditional markets for any great length of time – it has to be a sideshow and one that I still expect to eventually close down, despite the company’s (well-intentioned) protestations to the contrary.