Cisco’s OCP message: The network is now AI’s critical path, and openness is the price of admission

For most of its history, Cisco Systems Inc. won by building vertically integrated network products and asking customers to buy all of it. The company did very well with that model. Security, meanwhile, was something Cisco sold as a separate product line rather than something that was inherent to its infrastructure. Patching a core switch meant scheduling a maintenance window, crossing your fingers and hoping nothing broke. Under Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, Cisco has moved away from that model and embraced openness. That’s why I found Cisco’s announcements at this week’s Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose more interesting for what they reveal about the company than for the products themselves. As Mike Wheatley outlined in his SiliconANGLE post, Cisco rolled out a new pluggable optics form factor with Nvidia Corp., shipped its first Silicon One G300 systems, introduced…