Two representatives from Cisco this week for the first time attended a meeting of vendors and service providers brought together by rival Juniper to push for a secure and profitable public IP network.
Cisco sent Monique Morrow, a consulting engineer, and Suraj Shetty, director of marketing for Cisco’s routing technology group, as observers to the Juniper-organized Infranet Initiative Council meeting held in Paris during the MPLS World Congress ’05 conference. Cisco was there to try to push the council’s efforts more towards the standards organizations, a Cisco spokesman said.
“Our goal there was to encourage the council to take its work to the standards bodies, which Cisco feels is the best way to advance these types of activities,” the spokesman said. “Monique and Suraj were there merely to observe the proceedings. We have no plans to join the IIC.”
Morrow and Shetty were not immediately available to comment.
The IIC was formed a year ago to unite the industry around a common vision for public networking that attempts to resolve some shortcomings Juniper says are inherent in the Internet. Juniper is proposing the definition of two interfaces – a user-to-network interface between customers and service providers, and a so-called inter-carrier interface between service providers – that will facilitate the construction of an “infranet” combining the ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet with the predictable performance and security of a private network.
Juniper has said that these interfaces will comply with IETF RFCs on MPLS, RSVP and L2TP.
The IIC hopes that this infranet will ultimately provide the global infrastructure required to support machine-to-machine grid computing, unlock the full potential of Web-enabled applications and finally usher in the era of the online economy.
Some observers have prodded Cisco into joining the IIC for the good of the industry, while others maintain it is a Juniper marketing tactic intended to alienate its rival.
Cisco has maintained that IIC activities are best left to standards bodies such as ITU-T, ATIS and ETSI, “which currently are addressing many of the multi-SP networking ideas associated with Infranet,” the Cisco spokesman says.
“Cisco has made contributions for Multi-SP networking in study group 13 of ITU-T,” the spokesman says. “Juniper is a member of ITU-T, and we welcome the IIC to join us in working this initiative.”
But the IIC, which invites companies to attend a segment of IIC meetings as observers, had a counteroffer.
“We had several observing companies attend our meeting at Supercomm, and the majority became members,” an IIC spokesman said. “The IIC is excited that Cisco attended in Paris as an observer, and their further involvement would be in the best interest of communications.”
This week’s meeting in Paris was the first IIC gathering of the year. Members discussed further composition development and planning around IIC use cases, the IIC spokesman said.
IIC membership now stands at 35 with another eight about to join, the IIC spokesman said. In addition to founder Juniper, IIC executive-level members include America Online, British Telecom, China Unicom, France Telecom, HP, Huawei, IBM, KT, Level 3, Oracle, Orange, Polycom, Qwest, T-Com, T-Systems, Telenor, Tellabs and Telstra. They also include Juniper resellers Ericsson, Lucent and Siemens.
“Working group” level members include Juniper customers Masergy and Time Warner Telecom, wireless LAN partner Colubris Networks, and WLAN vendor Airespace, which Cisco is in the process of acquiring.
The IIC spokesman would not name the other observers at the meeting or the eight members about to join the group.
