loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

The Cat is Out of the Bag

The Cat is Out of the Bag

Brad Reese from NetworkWorld broke the story of my departure from Cisco today - arguably one of the most under-whelming stories of the new millenia although somewhat personally impacting with a bit of ego-gratification thrown in.

I mean, when I joined Cisco 11+ years ago as a Systems Engineer there was no such fanfare! I got a nice t-shirt from my previous company as a thank you, and put my stuff into my Honda and drove across the country, moving to San Francisco to work with the financial customers on the west coast.

Rapidly the financial customers became the 'dot com' customers with really network-intensive infrastructures- CNet, Yahoo, Hotmail, Exodus, and multiple pet-food companies all of whom thought that Fedex liked 40lb bags of kibbles.

From there ended up leaving the field and going to a product management role for the application delivery products: server load balancing, global server load balancing (where the bulk of my early patent filings came from), caching, IP/TV, and content distribution networks. A lot of good learning here.

Then in 2001 on to the Catalyst 6500 line, roles in software, hardware, and chipset product management, the high point being the introduction of the Supervisor 720 and associated linecards in 2003. Had a ball with that and still have the poster we made sitting in my office.

In 2004 Luca Cafiero, Tom Edsall, and I were sitting in a room having one of those not-so-quiet meetings where we discussed what to build next. I assure you there is nothing any engineer or PM gets more passionate about than what to build next and nothing they love more than the opportunity for a clean-sheet design. For some engineers and PMs it is a once-in-a-career chance to apply everything you learned and everything you think would be 'really cool' and put it into play. As interactive as those meetings are we walked out of it with a base-line plan for what would become over the next four years of architecture, research, and then development the Nexus line. I was fortunate that I got to be a part of this project with new ASICs, new operating system, new systems design, and new management platform.

In 2006, in collaboration with my mentor and boss Jayshree Ullal, I took on an interesting 'rotation' role into marketing, something I had not understood very well and wanted to learn so I would know what to expect. This ended up being an entirely different set of challenges than I had expected- one of culture change, resource reallocation, budget alignment, and so on. It wasn't about inventing the cool feature or product line any more, it was about how to cost-effectively tell the story the best way possible so the right people hear it. I knew how to tell the story, but wasn't certain how to get it beyond the four walls I could speak to.

We created a vision for Cisco - Data Center 3.0, that put a wrapper around the breadth of technology we were trying to consistently communicate. We started the data center blog, and for a few months it wallowed but rather than keeping it to just the executives we encouraged many people to 'pile on' and participate. In the end the DC blog became the top blog only passed by the News@Cisco one (which is the default landing page so hard to beat it).
We built up a stellar team and then in twelve months launched more product lines into the market than many groups or companies do in three-five years. Lot of fun, rewarding, and a very intense time.

Finally, I was spending a lot of my time writing development plans and marketing strategies for cloud computing, virtualization, and espousing the benefit of looking at the data center as a whole, not just the parts.

So finally, after eleven+ years, I started to look around outside of Cisco- some opportunities sneak through the firewall and some looked interesting. I wasn't sure what to do next, go back to engineering? rotate through sales? stick with marketing? While all have their merits none were that exciting singularly.

Rather than taking the first job that made it through to my inbox or voicemail I decided to take a few months off, take a vacation somewhere I could never do while employed (am thinking of climbing Kilimanjaro and then playing Hemingway with a camera for a bit), and see what opportunities do exist that would be a good match. There are three things I am doing though:

1) I started a small software company to build a software application/service for the general aviation community. It's fun to apply least-cost-path routing algorithms to plane traffic and find the truly optimum path, altitude, and fuel stop for any trip.

2) Taking the above-said vacation, any ideas on where to go beyond shooting big game with a Canon 5D please let me know

3) Datacenter, virtualization, and cloud consulting with a few companies in the valley. As one of my all-time favorite managers (Jim, you know who you are) said to me you have to 'keep the blade sharp' - so I know I need to keep my toes in the water while finalizing my next step, which is this afternoon's activity.

dg

Author: Douglas Gourlay

high-tech executive with interests in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, and IT/Tech government policy. VP of Marketing at Arista Networks - this blog reflects Doug's personal views and opinions and not necessarily those of Arista Networks.