Hello Gary, perhaps you haven't read the questions that I submitted on Balaji Sivasubramanian's post, so I'll share them here for your consideration.

I’d like to know more about the path that Cisco pursued to evolve towards an “application aware” architecture. This back-story (how Cisco arrived at this juncture) would be very helpful to industry analysts, customers and institutional investors. Here’s some of the key questions on my mind.

- What were the primary roadblocks that inhibited the adoption of this innovative approach in the past?

- A purpose-built hardware solution seems to be the road less traveled, because it requires a greater R&D investment. Why did Cisco take this approach, and decide against using one of the alternatives?

- What legacy design challenges did Cisco have to overcome, before it could attain the advantages of the ACI fabric orchestration model?

- My follow-on question is about the status of the "Cisco One" initiative -- How is the developer ecosystem evolving since the announcement, and how many of the planned APIs are actually available?

I would appreciate it if you could share these details in a follow-on blog post. It would help to fully understand why Cisco specifically chose a solution deployment methodology that’s somewhat different from competitors. Thanking you in advance for your consideration.