Cisco Seen As Trying To 'Slow Down Arista Anyway They Can' With Patent Lawsuits (crn.com) 124
An anonymous reader shares an article by CRN:Partners say Cisco's end game with its patent lawsuits against Arista Networks is simply to slow the fast-growing networking company and stunt any innovation efforts from competitors. "Cisco's goal is to try to slow down Arista and competitors any way they can," said Chris Becerra, president and CEO of Terrapin Systems, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based Arista partner. "If they don't have the technology to beat them out there, they're going to try to slow them down any way possible." Last week, the San Jose, Calif.-based network giant won three of five patent infringement suits against Santa Clara, Calif.-based Arista dealing with its networking switches. The International Trade Commission recommended a ban on Arista product imports containing the infringing technology. Additionally, the ITC also ruled earlier this year that Arista infringed on several other Cisco patents pertaining to its private VLANS, system database and externally managing router configuration with a centralized database -- recommending a similar ban on Arista imports.For those unfamiliar, Cisco had filed its trade complaint in December 2014, in which it sought a ban on Arista's switches. Arista, which designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions, was formed by former Cisco employees.
Cisco is pushing Arista into the arms of Huawei (Score:1)
Arista being a tiny company - compared to Cisco - and what Cisco is doing is to stymie Arista any way it can
This will only push Arista into the arms of Huawei - a competitor, yes, but the enemy of my enemy, in business sense, can be my partner
On the flip side... (Score:2)
I have worked in a position to support a variety of vendors and help customers select devices.
When a switch vendor *does* go their own way, management interface wise, no one will touch them for managed switches. They can comply with all the standards, have all the functionality, and outperform Cisco gear in every metric and undercut by a huge margin, but if their CLI does not look like Cisco's IOS style CLI, customers won't touch them with a thousand foot pole.
Juniper has been the only vendor to at least s
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Cisco's CLI is abysmal. There are much better, more efficient CLIs out there. And if you are tied to a single CLI, you're just lazy. You should be able to adapt and upgrade your brain to use the tools you have, rather than pick one because it is all you know.
IT is about managing change. CLIs have come and gone. I can't recall how many defunct CLIs I used to know.
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IT is about managing change
In my experience, in practice IT is largely about avoiding change at all possible cost. Sure, it can be faster or bigger, but if it is *different*, then it is generally reviled.
Cisco's business is largely based on this principle, and there's no denying that the entire industry is forced to replicate their CLI, like it or not (Juniper has been about the only company to have some measure of success with managed networking *without* impersonating the Cisco CLI). There are some asinine things about the Cisco
It's "any way", not "anyway" (Score:1)
Fer cryin' out loud.
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sure, just like they did for "awhile"
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Merriam Webster [merriam-webster.com] or anonymous coward... whom should I trust?
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You're ignoring the Merriam Webster definition's link to "anywise" in the full definition.
More explicitly:
anyway
adv.
1. In any way or manner whatever: Get the job done anyway you can.
2. In any case; at least: I don't know if it was lost or stolen; anyway, it's gone.
3. Nevertheless; regardless: It was raining but they played the game anyway.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edi
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Which raises the original question. Is the measure two well known dictionaries and a basic knowledge of grammar (hint: anyway is an adverb modifying the verb -- answering the question how) versus one anonymous coward misapplying their grammar (treating "any way" as as a the object of an omitted prepositional phrase -- "by using any way that they can").
I pointed to about 9000 examples in popular media. Whether you've taken note of those uses is not relevant.
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Multiple dictionaries and thousands of examples written by professional writers in popular media are indeed right because there are thousand of them. English is a language principally established by convention, not by proscriptive rules. The examples are not only relevant, they are the quintessential measure of whether a use is accepted or not.
You claim that there is no adverb there -- so diagram that sentence. What does "anyway" (or "any way") do in the sentence? If it is not an adverb, then what is it
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It's a adverb, you turd.
anyway [ahdictionary.com]
adv.
1. In any way or manner whatever: Get the job done anyway you can.
2. In any case; at least: I don't know if it was lost or stolen; anyway, it's gone.
3. Nevertheless; regardless: It was raining but they played the game anyway.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
You've studiously avoided dealing with that definition and example, but until Houghton Mifflin
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anyway [ahdictionary.com]
adv.
1. In any way or manner whatever: Get the job done anyway you can.
2. In any case; at least: I don't know if it was lost or stolen; anyway, it's gone.
3. Nevertheless; regardless: It was raining but they played the game anyway.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Anyway, adverb. I can keep lin
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They did. As I suggested, click the link for "anywise," which the first You'd do well do follow your own advice and read the full definition.
It's interesting that the only replies to all this are anonymous cowards with a troll moderation fetish, an odd interest in 0-rated posts, and a dead certainty that they're right despite multiple dictionaries indicating otherwise. Slashdot at its finest.
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"in any way" is preposition, adjective, noun.
"anyway" is also an adverb, just as they say.
The former does not prove that the latter is wrong. Merely that there are multiple forms. Odd that you'll only selectively accept definitions from the same source.
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Andy Bechtolsheim is a co-founder of Sun, back in 1982. Two of the three founders only worked at Cisco for seven years, both part of the acquisition of Granite Systems in 1996. The synopsis makes it sound like the company is a Cisco employee-stealing corp.
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Conflicting authority [ahdictionary.com]. Grammerly.com can go to the same hell reserved for reformers attempting to eradicate "ain't" and the split infinitive.
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Anyways... :D
Re: Patents should be abolished (Score:1)
Data is not knowledge.
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All of the US trade agreements include a provision which forces foreign trading partners honor US copyrights if they want to continue trading with the US.
Piss off Cisco (Score:5, Interesting)
For years we bought pretty much only Cisco. Then from about 2003 onwards the sales team took over. Gone were the days of a useful website where you could quickly drill down to the documentation you wanted. Now you're presented with endless glossy white paper sales pitches full of buzzwords.
In parallel their hardware costs started to climb relative to their competitors. It was still very good hardware but all that glossy sales pitch and TV ad campaigns have to be paid for somehow so per port $ increases it is. To make their 10Gbit Nexus line they actually spun off a company, let them do the design and then bought them back once they had a product to prevent any ugliness with stock prices. Fair enough, but that's extra labor you have to recoup, so a bit extra $ per port increase there to.
When we needed 100 10Gbit ports we looked at Cisco, laughed at the price and bought Arista It's lower latency, rock solid and just works (ie all the things you used to expect from Cisco) but a hell of a lot cheaper.
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Yeah Cisco has been a software company since 1999 (Score:2)
Since at least 1999, Cisco executives have been saying that Cisco is really a software company - anybody can buy the same chips they buy and build similar hardware. Cisco invented HSRP, GLBP, PaGP, CDP,VTP, PVST/PVST+, RPVST+, MSTP, IGRP, EIGRP, CGMP, etc. before other companies followed them and started using similar vendor-neutral protocols.
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Which, as much as you may hate Cisco, their support is still the best in the industry.
I haven't been in this field for a few years but I always thought Adtran support was the best I had ever encountered. Every time I ever needed any CLI help, 1 phone call (no transfers) got me direct to a level 2 support rep who knew their stuff.
Perhaps things are different now...
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Cisco must be really worried. The NSA screwed them, and they can't seem to compete fairly with Arista or Huwawei or any of the others eating into their market. Flailing patents around is usually a sign that a company is mortally wounded and getting desperate.
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To add to this, Cisco's reliability has gone down sharply over the last decade. Gone are the days where you could trust that Cisco could handle anything you threw at it. A few years back one of my customers had a firewall that kept hard crashing and then rebooting, I had them upgrade the memory and it stopped crashing long enough to let me know that someone had installed a botnet node behind the firewall. I get that it was a LOT of connections, but hard crashing is not an acceptable failure mode for a fi
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I also never understood why their PIX and ASA series had the most flaky power connector of all time... you look at that thing wrong and it will reboot...
Thanks, Cisco. I paid the Cisco tax for a quality hardware firewall but got the hardest thing to configure (it doesn't even follow your own IOS command syntax), uses some bolted on Java-based web configuration utility and reboots if you physically touch it.
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I always wondered what the death of the low-end access router for Internet access meant. There was a time when pretty much every business with Internet had a 2500 or 2600 access router with either a standalone CSU/DSU or WIC for Internet access.
The switch to broadband made those devices redundant. While Cisco kept making money through ever expanding infrastructure, I wonder if they just got fat and lazy on enterprise dollars and forgot about the lessons from competing on the lower end.
Even in places where
Says Arista. Multiple courts say Arista violates (Score:5, Interesting)
As TFS mentions, "said Chris Becerra, president and CEO of Terrapin Systems, an Arista partner. " Arista says "wah Cisco is being mean to us" - after we illegally violated not one Cisco patent, but many, as confirmed by multiple hearings. On top of that, Arista is headed by a bunch of former Cisco employees. Sorry guys, when Cisco was paying you each $200,000 to develop new technologies, that was so CISCO could use them, not so you could take them home and sell them yourself.
If a bunch of people invested and risked their own time and money in the R&D for these technologies and came up with something Cisco didn't have, I would be rooting for them. When you're a Cisco employee living on Cisco money, working on Cisco projects, the results belong to Cisco.
$430K / year "slaves"? You need major reality chec (Score:4, Insightful)
The Cisco vice presidents who formed Arista were paid by Cisco about $250,00 annual base salary, $88,000 cash bonus each year, plus $150,000 stock bonus. So in total they each got about $430,000 per year.
If you think that's ANYTHING like slavery at all, you you're seriously divorced from reality. I -almost- wish you could experience being a slave, or even a typical third-world citizen, for just five minutes so you could get a sense of perspective for your spoiled, entitled, whining little ass.
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That's pocket change at that level. I doubt those are even the correct numbers. They strike me as being extremely low.
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I'm paid $75,000 annually and I put about $2,300 in the bank each month. I don't cook at home, at all, ever. I spend excessively, and still bank over 60% of my paycheck. This time next year, it will be over 85% of my paycheck.
$75k is pocket change at my level. I've been offered $135,000 plus a $13k hiring bonus.
How? I'd love to see your budget (Score:2)
I'm pretty thrifty, but I have hard time imagining what your budget must look like. Unless perhaps you live in a country with very low cost of living, are single, and have your home paid off.
I did just pull up MY old budget from when I brought home 40% less money. I'm working out where I WANT to be putting the "extra" money, which doesn't line up with where I am spending it, I don't think. (I don't -think- because I haven't done a written budget recently).
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Unless perhaps you live in a country with very low cost of living,
United States, baltimore city. The house was $50k and is 1.7 miles from the light rail system. Public transit is slow, so I drive; I may amend that again some time soon.
are single,
SPD, so aromantic and asexual (these are complex topics; sex isn't a non-thing for me, but doesn't provide a disproportionate rewards mechanism or impulsive excitement, so fairly less-interesting than pizza which necessarily has fewer complications and strings). If I were otherwise, the additional cost of living for a mate would be, opt
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On top of that, Arista is headed by a bunch of former Cisco employees. Sorry guys, when Cisco was paying you each $200,000 to develop new technologies, that was so CISCO could use them, not so you could take them home and sell them yourself.
I'm aware of Cisco doing that spinning-in shit on a regular basis, but do you have evidence that Arista was founded by Cisco for this purpose?
What? (Score:2)
I'm not sure what you're saying / asking. Arista was founded by Cisco vice presidents who left Cisco and starting selling Cisco's patented inventions for their own personal enrichment. It was not "founded by Cisco".
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So are you.
It's an extremely stupid argument to make especially since networking is about published standards and not trade secrets.
Your school paid you $1.6 million for four years? (Score:2)
> I'm one of those evil people who left school and used some of the things I had learned for personal enrichment.
> So are you.
Did your school pay you $430,000 / year for you to help manage projects creating patented new technology, and in exchange you signed an NDA?
Me neither.
> since networking is about published standards and not trade secrets.
Some prefer open standards. I do. A few Cisco proprietary protocols which are/were better than the open standards of the time: HSRP, GLBP, PaGP, CDP,VTP, PV
Rephrasing: Cisco sets the standard, others follow (Score:2)
The reply about EIGRP made me think of a clearer way of saying it. Cisco sets the standard. Other vendors follow the standards. Most of the open protocols are copies of what Cisco did 5 or 10 years earlier.
As I said before, where there is a choice, I tend to prefer the ooen standard. I also give credit where credit is due, acknowledging that the open standard I use is based on Cisco's innovation.
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First with new ideas every time isn't luck (Score:2)
> That means absolutely nothing for Cisco's ability or inability to innovate.
Cisco wasn't just the first to create an instant ethernet spanning protocol, or the first with load-balancing routing. There's a list of about 30 significant "firsts" for Cisco - one for every year of their existence. They don't just get lucky over and over and over again, they innovate, big time. Then they price accordingly. :)
I don't have an unlimited budget, so I don't buy new Cisco gear. I buy either "other" brand or us
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Cisco owns the stuff they signed over and the Cisco stuff afterwards but does not own the people forever like slaves.
Part of EIGRP, after 23 years. Cisco sets the stan (Score:2)
Yes, 23 years after Cisco introduced EIGRP, part of it is an open standard.
Still, it remains on the list of it "Cisco sets the standard, other vendors follow".
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Yeah, on the one hand, patent litigation to stunt a market is kind of bad play. On the other, patents are reasonable (14 years? Many technologies are too expensive or not ground-breaking enough to warrant licensing when invented, and *have* to sit; historically, patents on complex medical technology have frequently appeared over 150 years *before* the technology was feasible), you should negotiate reasonable licensing fees, and Arista is made up of a bunch of people who bailed on CISCO to compete with CI
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I'm not for abolishing patents, but I am for reducing the length the patent can be held. Technology patents that last even 20 years are crazy these days with the pace tech moves. I'd say 5 year max on tech related patents. By then, the tech will be out of date anyways, but they become open for use. If a company is only coming up with one product every 5 years, they're probably going to fail.
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Even better would be to make the patent period relative rather than a fixed nominal time, to make it future proof. I would suggest that a patent be valid for three median product half-cycle times for participants in the industry, up to a maximum of 20 years.
So, for (say) smart phones, when the product cycle is typically about one year, you get a patent protection of 1.5 years. For automotive where the product cycle is 5 years, you get 7.5, etc. As industries get faster or slow down, the patent period adju
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An easier more objective solution has been mentioned many times before, simply make the patent an annual fee that goes up exponentially every year. If something is that groundbreaking (eg invention of wifi) then they may be willing to pay. At some point they will realise it is just better to release it and just compete in other ways. Just need to work the formula for the fee appropriately.
Bonus: the extra patent fees could be a nice money spinner for the government.
Bonus 2: people can only become short term
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This entire thread ignores that you can invent something by observing current available techniques, well-ahead of refinement of said techniques. The artificial respirator was invented in like 1658; the first one was built in the 1800s, after multiple revisions to the steel-making process, the last one moving to a hot-blast furnace such that the same labor (wages!) required to make 400 tonnes of steel now made 80,000 tonnes of steel. For hundreds of years, building the patented device cost a *large*, and
Re: Study of Patents (Score:2)
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Re: Study of Patents (Score:2)
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That would be a really bad measure.
You want to know how often patents are actually helpful to startups or bringing out new products vs how often they are just used to prevent market entry.
Re: Study of Patents (Score:2)
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That's certainly partially true but it's hardly universal.
Cisco isn't remotely competitive...their own fault (Score:2)
If Cisco was even remotely price competitive, I'd still be a customer. They haven't been remotely close to the best value for ages and that got me looking at alternatives. Adding insult to injury is the rather poor quality of service you get when you place a call to the TAC to have a problem resolved. F that. We probably spend mid-9 figures a year on switch and routing gear. Cisco bids on everything and will show up with an army of sales weens for any meeting, offer to take anyone with a pulse out to
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About what I'd expect from an AC troll. My point is that you don't know what you're talking about.
Toodles...
That's an understatement (Score:4, Informative)
Arista, which designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions, was formed by former Cisco employees.
More specifically, Arista was started by Andy Bechtolsheim [wikipedia.org] who co-founded Sun. He went on to form a little company called Granite which was acquired by Cisco and formed the basis for their gigabit switching line (we all know it as the juggernaut called "Catalyst" switches). Many years after selling their 1Gb business to Cisco he went on to form Arista which, at it's core, is a 10Gb multilayer switch built on the "spline-leaf" concept (contrasted with the more traditional multi-tiered campus model of Core/Distribution/Access that we've been building for a decade or two).
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Keeping the Lawyers Hopping (Score:2)
> externally managing router configuration with a centralized database
You can patent that? Hmm... I wonder who holds the patents for:
* managing bank accounts with a centralized database
* managing medical records with a centralized database
* managing music collections with a centralized database
* managing contact information with a centralized database
* managing cable boxes with a centralized database
* managing user profiles with a centralized database
* managing picture albums with a centralized database
*
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I always lamented how for the most part I would have to support two ways of doing it:
-The standards based way that works with almost every vendor
-The version that would work with Cisco, who would refuse to support the standard and instead push their different, but not any better approach and sometimes worse
Sure, many times Cisco's version came first and they deserve props for that, but they were bad about circling back and implementing the cross-vendor approach.