At 3:34 AM -0400 5/25/02, Kevin Cullimore wrote: >INS. Gobbled up by lucent during the somewhat less-than-rational corporate >atmosphere that reigned supreme not so long ago. I did not mean to imply >that he jumped ship from one to another, merely that he went from an >organization most directly in competition with Cisco's professional services >division to what turned out to be Cisco's most fierce short-term competitor >for the devices we obsess over. His sustained focus on cisco-specific >implementation of routing technologies is readily perceived as a conflict of >interest if he's not directly charged with competitive endeavors. >
Sometimes it seems like you just can't win. First, I know Jeff and he's an honorable guy (for the occasional would-be sniper on the list, go look at the acknowledgements in Vol. I of Doyle). Jeff is/was a CCIE and CCSI. There's the perception of conflict of interest because he works for Juniper. As I said, I avoided taking the CCIE exam because I was worried about appearance of conflict of interest. Doesn't seem like either works, does it? An observation about the carrier market in which Jeff and I play: as opposed to many enterprises, the customers WANT multiple vendors, to avoid single points of failure, and to give them leverage with vendors. The market reality would be that a Juniper person HAS to stay current with Cisco because they will need to interoperate with them. Second, there is movement among the major vendors. Many of Juniper's key engineers came from Cisco and still have friends there. Third, outside the sales arena, there is a great deal of engineering cooperation. In my own direct experience, I'm the lead author on a couple of IETF BGP benchmarking drafts, but my coauthors are from Cisco, Juniper, NextHop, and Nortel. Every one has shared details of their implementations, in an honest attempt to come up with a design that's fairest to everyone. For example, there are implementation-specific ways to send updates to a BGP router (send all prefixes of a given length together, send the least-specific followed by all more-specifics, etc.) that will make a particular router converge the fastest. What the team has been doing is coming up with a randomized test stream that is equally fair to all implementations. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=45023&t=45001 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
