Media Coverage

So can there be a newcomer, a “unicorn” vendor that could threaten to at least steal some market share from these giants? A decade or two ago, there was strong interest in the VC space to come up with “the next Cisco”, largely centered in startups in the Boston area, but it didn’t generate anything notable. More recently, competition to our two network giants has come from something more diffuse than unicorn-like, the “white box” or “open-model” approach.

DriveNets is a disaggregated or cluster-router model, where a collection of devices connected in a mesh becomes in effect one high-capacity device or even a series of virtual devices hosted on a single cluster. DriveNets is the most successful of the Cisco/Juniper IP infrastructure competitors, but the company has focused on the IP core network, in no small part because AT&T played a big role in getting the company launched. The problems with this are 1) that there aren’t as many core devices as devices at other network levels, and 2) the core is arguably moving toward agile optics. Still, for the service provider space, DriveNets is a real contender.

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