Cisco to open up IOS? February 5
Opening up the Cisco IOS of which has traditionally been proprietary is a huge push toward collaboration with competitors. Cisco has clearly taken a step in a different direction from its traditional position. This isnt just collaborative services between Cisco and its competitors, this is a full fledged effort to, shall we say, standardize infrastructure software.
Just imagine the benefit of your company to write API’s that can access the Cisco IOS services. This is a profound move to solicit competitors working together to provide a solution thats in the best interest of their customers. Service Providers should take more than a few notes from this mentality.
Cisco plans to “componentize” IOS – developing only one implementation of a specific function instead of several, depending on the image – dynamically link IOS services and move the software onto a Unix-based kernel. Cisco then plans to open up interfaces on IOS to allow third-party and customer-developed applications to access IOS services.