Hello Lennie,

Many thanks for taking the time to comment, much appreciated.
Actually, your points bring more food for thoughts, and are touching on a couple of aspects I had not discussed above explicitly enough. Thank you for that !

1. We have to start to move from “building networks that here to last” to “networks built for change”. Because some past solutions (you highlighted a couple of them) won’t just work in the future in my humble opinion. A good example of that is the recent Cisco Unified Access that I am sure you have seen. We designed and developed very innovative solutions (asic, hardware, software) which will allow our customers to cope more intelligently with the wired/wireless convergence and the proliferation of devices. In that case, old solutions (more switches and access points without any intelligent policy engine) would not work moving forward. See : http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns1187/index.html

2. The IT storm discussed above calls even more for architectural approaches. That is how we can build "networks for change".In future posts, I intend to discuss specific examples of that.

3. “As all these things people want don’t fit the networks we have”. BYOD comes to mind, and there are other examples. Yes, networks need to evolve and wil haev to evolve. Thank you for mentioning IPv6, fully agree. Ultimately, I see it as an opportunity for IT departments in charge of corporate infrastructure to bring even more value to their business because as you said “people want it”.

By the way, with regards to one of the things you listed, you may be interested in the introduction of the Next-Generation 100 Gigabit CMOS-based Transceivers. See : http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1157237

Again, many thanks for your comments Lennie. Eric