CloudGenix CEO Blasts Cisco's Viptela SD-WAN Acquisition, Talks 'Game Day' Channel Engagement

#Cisco s acquisition of #Viptela won't boost the networking giant's position in the fast growing #softwaredefinedWAN market, according to Kumar Ramachandran, founder and CEO of #SDWAN startup $CloudGenix. "The Cisco acquisition of Viptela does two things simultaneously. One is, it gives great clarity to the market. And two, it confuses the heck out of Cisco customers," said Ramachandran, in an interview with CRN. "Clearly Cisco [Intelligent] WAN is a failure, that's why they bought Viptela." Ramachandran also talks to CRN about the vendor's Game Day channel initiative that pits CloudGenix's reps working alongside partners to close deals with new customers. "The partner walks out of the room literally with anywhere between 10 to 20 new deals in hand," he said.

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300085721/cloudgenix-ceo-blasts-ciscos-viptela-sd-wan-acquisition-talks-game-day-channel-engagement.htm

A bunch of ex-Cisco engineers say Cisco tried to kill their startup’s marketing event

#Cisco just completed its massive customer conference this week, Cisco Live, where tens of thousands of Cisco's customers descended on Las Vegas for a week of technology and parties. That seemed the perfect time for #CloudGenix, a startup founded by former Cisco engineers, to strike with a guerrilla-marketing event of their own. These engineers used to work on Cisco's wide-area networking (WAN) products, which are routers and switches that connect a network across long distances. The one thing they didn't plan on? Cisco's ability to block them. The strong arm of Cisco The networking industry, dominated by Cisco, is undergoing a huge change right now called "software-defined networking," where software is being used to set up and control computer networks. Cisco still makes most of its money selling hardware products. SDN is the most exciting thing to happen in corporate networks since, perhaps, Cisco itself was born, and networking engineers have been leaving Cisco in droves to launch new SDN startups. CloudGenix is one of those startups. It makes SDN software for WANs.

http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-says-cisco-tried-to-stop-marketing-event-2016-7