Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Seen As Trying To 'Slow Down Arista Anyway They Can' With Patent Lawsuits (crn.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article by CRN:Partners say Cisco's end game with its patent lawsuits against Arista Networks is simply to slow the fast-growing networking company and stunt any innovation efforts from competitors. "Cisco's goal is to try to slow down Arista and competitors any way they can," said Chris Becerra, president and CEO of Terrapin Systems, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based Arista partner. "If they don't have the technology to beat them out there, they're going to try to slow them down any way possible." Last week, the San Jose, Calif.-based network giant won three of five patent infringement suits against Santa Clara, Calif.-based Arista dealing with its networking switches. The International Trade Commission recommended a ban on Arista product imports containing the infringing technology. Additionally, the ITC also ruled earlier this year that Arista infringed on several other Cisco patents pertaining to its private VLANS, system database and externally managing router configuration with a centralized database -- recommending a similar ban on Arista imports.For those unfamiliar, Cisco had filed its trade complaint in December 2014, in which it sought a ban on Arista's switches. Arista, which designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions, was formed by former Cisco employees.
Fer cryin' out loud.
For years we bought pretty much only Cisco. Then from about 2003 onwards the sales team took over. Gone were the days of a useful website where you could quickly drill down to the documentation you wanted. Now you're presented with endless glossy white paper sales pitches full of buzzwords.
In parallel their hardware costs started to climb relative to their competitors. It was still very good hardware but all that glossy sales pitch and TV ad campaigns have to be paid for somehow so per port $ increases it is. To make their 10Gbit Nexus line they actually spun off a company, let them do the design and then bought them back once they had a product to prevent any ugliness with stock prices. Fair enough, but that's extra labor you have to recoup, so a bit extra $ per port increase there to.
When we needed 100 10Gbit ports we looked at Cisco, laughed at the price and bought Arista It's lower latency, rock solid and just works (ie all the things you used to expect from Cisco) but a hell of a lot cheaper.
As TFS mentions, "said Chris Becerra, president and CEO of Terrapin Systems, an Arista partner. " Arista says "wah Cisco is being mean to us" - after we illegally violated not one Cisco patent, but many, as confirmed by multiple hearings. On top of that, Arista is headed by a bunch of former Cisco employees. Sorry guys, when Cisco was paying you each $200,000 to develop new technologies, that was so CISCO could use them, not so you could take them home and sell them yourself.
If a bunch of people invested and risked their own time and money in the R&D for these technologies and came up with something Cisco didn't have, I would be rooting for them. When you're a Cisco employee living on Cisco money, working on Cisco projects, the results belong to Cisco.
On top of that, Arista is headed by a bunch of former Cisco employees. Sorry guys, when Cisco was paying you each $200,000 to develop new technologies, that was so CISCO could use them, not so you could take them home and sell them yourself.
I'm aware of Cisco doing that spinning-in shit on a regular basis, but do you have evidence that Arista was founded by Cisco for this purpose?
Ezekiel 23:20
If Cisco was even remotely price competitive, I'd still be a customer. They haven't been remotely close to the best value for ages and that got me looking at alternatives. Adding insult to injury is the rather poor quality of service you get when you place a call to the TAC to have a problem resolved. F that. We probably spend mid-9 figures a year on switch and routing gear. Cisco bids on everything and will show up with an army of sales weens for any meeting, offer to take anyone with a pulse out to dinner/drinks/ and "gentlemen's clubs", but they just don't offer the service or value proposition for anyone who takes the time to make an apples to apples comparison with Arista.
Merchant silicon + decent software stack + stellar customer service works for me.
I'm not sure what you're saying / asking. Arista was founded by Cisco vice presidents who left Cisco and starting selling Cisco's patented inventions for their own personal enrichment. It was not "founded by Cisco".
Data is not knowledge.
Arista, which designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions, was formed by former Cisco employees.
More specifically, Arista was started by Andy Bechtolsheim who co-founded Sun. He went on to form a little company called Granite which was acquired by Cisco and formed the basis for their gigabit switching line (we all know it as the juggernaut called "Catalyst" switches). Many years after selling their 1Gb business to Cisco he went on to form Arista which, at it's core, is a 10Gb multilayer switch built on the "spline-leaf" concept (contrasted with the more traditional multi-tiered campus model of Core/Distribution/Access that we've been building for a decade or two).
I'm not for abolishing patents, but I am for reducing the length the patent can be held. Technology patents that last even 20 years are crazy these days with the pace tech moves. I'd say 5 year max on tech related patents. By then, the tech will be out of date anyways, but they become open for use. If a company is only coming up with one product every 5 years, they're probably going to fail.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
That would be a really bad measure.
You want to know how often patents are actually helpful to startups or bringing out new products vs how often they are just used to prevent market entry.
The Cisco vice presidents who formed Arista were paid by Cisco about $250,00 annual base salary, $88,000 cash bonus each year, plus $150,000 stock bonus. So in total they each got about $430,000 per year.
If you think that's ANYTHING like slavery at all, you you're seriously divorced from reality. I -almost- wish you could experience being a slave, or even a typical third-world citizen, for just five minutes so you could get a sense of perspective for your spoiled, entitled, whining little ass.
Even better would be to make the patent period relative rather than a fixed nominal time, to make it future proof. I would suggest that a patent be valid for three median product half-cycle times for participants in the industry, up to a maximum of 20 years.
So, for (say) smart phones, when the product cycle is typically about one year, you get a patent protection of 1.5 years. For automotive where the product cycle is 5 years, you get 7.5, etc. As industries get faster or slow down, the patent period adjusts accordingly. But if your industry is terribly slow, like, say, power plant construction, patents still cap out at 20 years.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
That would be always, since a single patent or small group of parents is of no use whatsoever, as an established company would swat you like a fly with a countersuit on 1000+ patents of theirs you infringed. Only by accumulating a very large number of patents and cross-licensing them can you really be safe from that.
Then companies would just file the same patent over and over and slightly change the wording.
Arista being a tiny company - compared to Cisco - and what Cisco is doing is to stymie Arista any way it can
This will only push Arista into the arms of Huawei - a competitor, yes, but the enemy of my enemy, in business sense, can be my partner
All of the US trade agreements include a provision which forces foreign trading partners honor US copyrights if they want to continue trading with the US.
That's certainly partially true but it's hardly universal.
Since at least 1999, Cisco executives have been saying that Cisco is really a software company - anybody can buy the same chips they buy and build similar hardware. Cisco invented HSRP, GLBP, PaGP, CDP,VTP, PVST/PVST+, RPVST+, MSTP, IGRP, EIGRP, CGMP, etc. before other companies followed them and started using similar vendor-neutral protocols.
> I'm one of those evil people who left school and used some of the things I had learned for personal enrichment.
> So are you.
Did your school pay you $430,000 / year for you to help manage projects creating patented new technology, and in exchange you signed an NDA?
Me neither.
> since networking is about published standards and not trade secrets.
Some prefer open standards. I do. A few Cisco proprietary protocols which are/were better than the open standards of the time: HSRP, GLBP, PaGP, CDP,VTP, PVST/PVST+, RPVST+, IGRP,EIGRP, CGMP, and many more. CISCO networking isn't "about published standards", it's about always being two steps ahead of the standards.
> externally managing router configuration with a centralized database
You can patent that? Hmm... I wonder who holds the patents for:
* managing bank accounts with a centralized database
* managing medical records with a centralized database
* managing music collections with a centralized database
* managing contact information with a centralized database
* managing cable boxes with a centralized database
* managing user profiles with a centralized database
* managing picture albums with a centralized database
* managing patents with a centralized database!!!
Hop Lawyer, Hop!
:T:R:A:N:S:
About what I'd expect from an AC troll. My point is that you don't know what you're talking about.
Toodles...
An easier more objective solution has been mentioned many times before, simply make the patent an annual fee that goes up exponentially every year. If something is that groundbreaking (eg invention of wifi) then they may be willing to pay. At some point they will realise it is just better to release it and just compete in other ways. Just need to work the formula for the fee appropriately.
Bonus: the extra patent fees could be a nice money spinner for the government.
Bonus 2: people can only become short term patent trolls, and by explicitly registering and expiring patents we are ensuring things are being released into commons.
Yes, 23 years after Cisco introduced EIGRP, part of it is an open standard.
Still, it remains on the list of it "Cisco sets the standard, other vendors follow".
The reply about EIGRP made me think of a clearer way of saying it. Cisco sets the standard. Other vendors follow the standards. Most of the open protocols are copies of what Cisco did 5 or 10 years earlier.
As I said before, where there is a choice, I tend to prefer the ooen standard. I also give credit where credit is due, acknowledging that the open standard I use is based on Cisco's innovation.
Then have the built upon patent become public as soon as the follow-on patent is granted, as it will have to reference the original. If you only use the public patent, you can't be sued.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I have worked in a position to support a variety of vendors and help customers select devices.
When a switch vendor *does* go their own way, management interface wise, no one will touch them for managed switches. They can comply with all the standards, have all the functionality, and outperform Cisco gear in every metric and undercut by a huge margin, but if their CLI does not look like Cisco's IOS style CLI, customers won't touch them with a thousand foot pole.
Juniper has been the only vendor to at least somewhat get away with a non-cisco like CLI, but even then it's generally a tough initial sale.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Since Cisco bought them out after they were successful than neither did they really.
Cisco owns the stuff they signed over and the Cisco stuff afterwards but does not own the people forever like slaves.
Yeah, on the one hand, patent litigation to stunt a market is kind of bad play. On the other, patents are reasonable (14 years? Many technologies are too expensive or not ground-breaking enough to warrant licensing when invented, and *have* to sit; historically, patents on complex medical technology have frequently appeared over 150 years *before* the technology was feasible), you should negotiate reasonable licensing fees, and Arista is made up of a bunch of people who bailed on CISCO to compete with CISCO using CISCO technology they stole.
It's hard to back people who get paid to work for someone, then run off with the work they did.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
In the world of protocols, just being a year earlier makes you the standard-setter. That means absolutely nothing for Cisco's ability or inability to innovate. If Cisco weren't the first, someone else would and there'd be the exact same discussion about someone else. This isn't bread baking where you can switch your supplier at a whim.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm paid $75,000 annually and I put about $2,300 in the bank each month. I don't cook at home, at all, ever. I spend excessively, and still bank over 60% of my paycheck. This time next year, it will be over 85% of my paycheck.
$75k is pocket change at my level. I've been offered $135,000 plus a $13k hiring bonus.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You can't build upon a patent. It's not a technical description of the invention, but a contrived legal one. If all I gave you was the patent application, you would not be able to build what the patent actually described.
This entire thread ignores that you can invent something by observing current available techniques, well-ahead of refinement of said techniques. The artificial respirator was invented in like 1658; the first one was built in the 1800s, after multiple revisions to the steel-making process, the last one moving to a hot-blast furnace such that the same labor (wages!) required to make 400 tonnes of steel now made 80,000 tonnes of steel. For hundreds of years, building the patented device cost a *large*, and then a small fortune--think of it like your cheap, used, economy car costs as much as a high-end Ferrari (multiple millions) instead of $4,000, and the rest of the market is adjusted up accordingly (meaning almost 100% of the cars bought today would be unpurchaseable even by the super-mega-rich; there wouldn't be enough human labor to make those cars *and* food).
We don't have an activation clause in patent law, and activation has all kinds of problems (patent trolls). At the same time, the United States is a first-to-file system: if you invent something, wait for the market to be capable of providing it, and then another inventor files the same invention, your 20 years of documented proof that you invented it back when it would have been impossible to market during the patent term doesn't mean shit; and if you try to make the device you invented, you have to pay a patent license. Further, new inventions in the field may make your previously-novel idea obvious, obviating a patent.
Patents are way harder than copyright.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
> That means absolutely nothing for Cisco's ability or inability to innovate.
Cisco wasn't just the first to create an instant ethernet spanning protocol, or the first with load-balancing routing. There's a list of about 30 significant "firsts" for Cisco - one for every year of their existence. They don't just get lucky over and over and over again, they innovate, big time. Then they price accordingly. :)
I don't have an unlimited budget, so I don't buy new Cisco gear. I buy either "other" brand or used Cisco. While I'm buying other, I know why Cisco sells five times as much as their closest competitor, and why the brand choices are a) Cisco or b) Other.
And what I was intending to describe by "built upon" patent was the original patent, then extended by the follow on, that the original patent would become public domain immediately upon filing of the follow on patent. Obviously the follow on patent improved upon the original significantly enough to warrant a new patent, rendering the original relatively worthless by comparison. Otherwise, the original would be enough, and the follow on is only an incremental improvement not worthy of a patent.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I always lamented how for the most part I would have to support two ways of doing it:
-The standards based way that works with almost every vendor
-The version that would work with Cisco, who would refuse to support the standard and instead push their different, but not any better approach and sometimes worse
Sure, many times Cisco's version came first and they deserve props for that, but they were bad about circling back and implementing the cross-vendor approach.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm pretty thrifty, but I have hard time imagining what your budget must look like. Unless perhaps you live in a country with very low cost of living, are single, and have your home paid off.
I did just pull up MY old budget from when I brought home 40% less money. I'm working out where I WANT to be putting the "extra" money, which doesn't line up with where I am spending it, I don't think. (I don't -think- because I haven't done a written budget recently).