The past few weeks have been full of deliberating big life changes as I’d been interviewing with Nuage Networks, excited to join their mission to move network virtualization forward with SDN solutions.
This month, I took the plunge and joined the team as the new Vice President of Business Development. I spent a good amount of time mulling my decision, wondering if the Nuage products really are as good as implied and if this would be the right career move. As I learned more about the Nuage Networks product suite and about what competitors are offering—my feelings went from fear to excitement and today I am confident that I made the right choice.
As soon as I was on boarded sufficiently, I dove head first into user manuals, roadmap presentations, detailed product descriptions, the sales pipeline and everything else I could get my hands on.
Let me tell you something, I like what I am seeing. None of the usual commentary about a half working product or mentions of items which are on the portfolio but “wink-wink” shouldn’t be sold. On the contrary, what I have discovered is a solid, polished and mature platform that can compete and surpass the most voluble marketers messaging in other large companies.
Here are some of the main things that I’m really liking:
- The UI is both easy on the eyes and easy to configure. Today, network admins are using CLI because they do not have a UI they like. But, the Nuage Networks Virtualized Service Platform is absolutely superb. The team has made configuration not only attractive but fun to work with. Catch this demo during TechFieldDay with Dimitri Stiladus and Florin Balus to see what I’m talking about.
- There is a strong debate in our industry around SDN about overlay and underlay and which one is more important. As you can imagine network hardware vendors have an opinion that differs from virtualization vendors. The Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) handles both overlay and underlay. It uses overlays/encapsulation to provide easier provisioning and overcome limitations in network hardware and uses existing Layer 3 routing protocols to correlate underlay information with overlay networks. Check out this cool live demo we did on SDNCentral to show you how it works in real time.
- The Crown Jewel is the Nuage Networks Virtualized Service Directory (VSD).
The VSD :
- Enforces network policies
- Defines business logic into the network
- Implements service-chaining capabilities
- Gathers relevant data and reports it to a Hadoop cluster
It does that and a ton more. Impressive.
Recently, at Interop 2014, Cisco announced that they will eventually offer something similar and VMware is replying they knew it’s important and are working on it but felt it was too confusing to talk about it. Good to know the big guys are agreeing it’s important and working on it, meanwhile the Nuage Networks VSD is already shipping and appreciated by several customers.
After my first week at Nuage Networks, I feel like I definitely made the right move. Nuage Networks’ products are truly deserving of being called the best and we’re establishing the use cases and customer testimonials to validate that claim. Keep an eye on us and learn about what we’re doing In the SDN space. We’re moving and growing quickly and will be providing more information on use cases, customer and partner integrations as well as new information on the launch of new technologies from Nuage Networks.
Please feel free to get in touch with questions or leave a comment on the blog and we’ll get right back to you.
Charles
P.S. For those of you who know a little bit of French, Nuage is the French word for cloud, so after my first day at work for Nuage, my youngest daughter looked at me pointing at the sky, which is unusually cloudy/rainy for sunny California and asked me if I am the one responsible for all this rain since I now work at Nuage Networks. 😀