ACG Research Blog: Roll It! ACG’s 2015 Omega Winners Are…

ACG Research is honored to announce the 2015 Omega Awards. The award recognizes excellence in message marketing for either a HotSeat, Whiteboard or Spotlight Innovation video as well as vendor operational excellence. The 2015 winners are Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, and iXia. Winners were cited and honored because “of their achievements in the areas of product innovation, message marketing or operational excellence,” said Ray Mota.

Big Switch Networks was the winner of the Breakthrough Innovation Product for its Big Cloud Fabric 3.0., which provides hyper-scale networking in public, hybrid and private clouds. BCF is unique in that it delivers on the core vision of SDN on more dimensions than any other solution currently available. Big Switch Networks is the first supplier to have achieved that goal. BCF uses open software running on low-cost, high performance merchant silicon switches from multiple white box partners. This makes the physical underlay network both efficient and programmable. BCF’s overlay virtual network is programmable in the same manner as the physical underlay network, supporting consistent policy deployments in a unified cloud computing fabric.

Left to Right Ray Mota, ACG; Douglas Murray, CEO, Kyle Forster, Founder; Shaun Page, VP of Worldwide Sales

BCF’s controller is also open and modular, able to integrate with cloud management systems like OpenStack and VMware, and providing visibility from the cloud management platform into the operation of its supporting network transparently. BCF’s controller is also open for extension and integration of optimization applications like Fabric Analytics to collect traffic data and use it to perform network optimizations directly. With BCF 3.0 “Big Switch Networks is achieving an important milestone in creating open, scalable, and versatile software-driven networking for the cloud. The true logic for the unified fabric’s operation is created in the BCF Controller and propagated to all participating network elements dynamically,” states Paul Parker Johnson.

HotSeat Winner was Brocade Communications. Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management at Brocade Communications, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay highlights the challenges operators have in 4G/LTE visibility, how to address them in a cost effective manner and the critical need for new, next-generation network visibility architectures as mobile operators ramp up to virtual EPC and 5G with billions of M2M connections and Internet of Things in the not too distant future.

Left to Right, Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management; Michael Bushong, Vice President of Product Management; Ray Mota, CEO

The Trusted Vendor Award went to Cisco, which has continued to demonstrate operational excellence and sustainability as measured by ACG’s financial vendor index. Cisco has very high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin, improved productivity and expense discipline; operating income increased 22.4% y-y. The company also has effective asset utilization, which yielded $3.52 for each fixed-asset dollar in 4Q15. Other operational factors contributing to Cisco receiving the award include efficient inventory management, one of the highest net cash ratios in the industry and a high receivables efficiency ratio.

Left to Right, Ray Mota and Sanjeev Mervana, Sr. Director, Cloud, Infrastructure, & Business Solutions for SPs

Ixia was awarded the Whiteboard winner category. In this video Dennis Cox, chief product officer of Ixia, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss the need for true 100% visibility. Today, many vendors claim to provide 100% visibility, but many drop packets and create blind spots in your application performance. Understand what is needed for true visibility and providing a secure network for optimal application performance.