Cisco's Bold Networking Start-Up - NYTimes.com

Apparently Cisco now subscribes to the view (attributed to Edwin Land) that “Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.”

In a recent call with journalists, John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, said the company had “reinvented” itself and was now a big believer in software-defined networking. Insiemi could be a networking product that would bridge the custom and commodity worlds for Cisco.

[…]

Insiemi could be one of the great face-offs in enterprise computing. Two of Arista’s founders, Andreas von Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, sold an earlier company to Cisco. They are also both billionaires, thanks to early investments in Google. Arista’s chief executive, Jayshree Ullal, is a former chief engineering director at Cisco. The three Cisco engineers involved in Insiemi, Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, and Luca Cafiero, are also wealthy, thanks to their work inside companies they led, which were hatched inside Cisco, financed largely by Cisco and then purchased by Cisco.

Cisco's Bold Networking Start-Up - NYTimes.com