Tucker—who was a co-creator of Sun’s little-exposed open source network virtualization project Crossbow – refers to the network as a “distributed application” and tosses about terms like “orchestration” and “automation” in relation to the network. He laughs gently at the concept of hardware-driven networking folks learning to become part of development communities and he thinks networking pros “might like” to play with APIs. He even talks about Cisco’s participation in Open Stack – the open source cloud management software project. But don’t get too excited – Tuckers cautions that Cisco will be bringing thoughts to the Open Stack table not making its own software open.

Specifically Tucker is taking to town the message that Cisco will be a key provider of network management and automation software for the cloud. And in doing so, Cisco would like to be seen as the provider of the “virtual private data center” –a cordoned-off enterprise data center in a publicly hosted cloud. That would mean selling the automation and management software necessary to enable these clouds (see the acquisition of LineSider Technologies this week), as well as the high-performance networking components necessary to support them.

But if Cisco is aiming to help carriers and very large enterprises build these publicly hosted private clouds, won’t that ultimately lead to many fewer on-premise data center LANs? In that case, just what will Cisco sell? Does the company believe that network management and automation software licensing will transplant hardware component sales? And just how will that message sit with Cisco’s core networking audience? After all, that’s a group highly invested in building and managing their own networks.

With this in mind, Tucker has a very fragile line to walk. In addressing these quandaries, Tucker promises Cisco won’t abandon its hardware roots and has plenty of units to sell in both building out these clouds and enabling companies that are not yet moving to the cloud. In the meantime, Cisco will also be selling both software and hardware appliances that will enable management of both virtual and physical networks, and will increasingly move to a software licensing model for a host of offerings that range from automation to use of hosted unified communications.

To be sure, Cisco is ahead of its networking rivals when it comes to virtualization and cloud management. But Cisco has also received flack for diluting its core networking focus with investments in side businesses like Flip cams. In the meantime, HP’s networking market share is apparently soaring and companies like Arista are offering equipment that rivals Cisco’s at much cheaper prices. It will be interesting to watch Cisco’s balancing act in coming months.

IBM will likely jam Intelliden into its monstrous Tivoli IT management suite. I assume it will get folded into Tivoli’s vast armada of Change & Configuration products.  Or maybe it will be absorbed into the horde of Network Management & Performance products. It’s hard to tell. Just delving into those product choices is overwhelming. Trying to figure out where Intelliden gets placed among them is a task that’s beyond me.

I’ve been covering the networking industry for about two years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever been approached by IBM PR regarding the network management capabilities of Tivoli. Come to think of it, most of the Big Four IT management companies don’t seem to have me on their radar. Only CA actively sends me news on network management technologies.  On the other hand, when I wrote for SearchCIO.com I received pitches from Tivoli fairly regularly. Does that say something about IBM’s Tivoli strategy? Market and sell to CIOs, not network managers and network engineers.

Given the choice, would you buy your network management tools from one of the Big Four or from independent vendors like NetScout, SolarWinds, Fluke, etc. And what do you do when your favorite vendor gets gobbled up, whether it’s Intelliden by IBM or NetQoS by CA?

Interop was once the networking show, but that ended years ago as the conference tried to become the virtualization show and the data center show to remain relevant.

That shift was reflective of an IT industry that seemed to place all of its emphasis on the data center with little on the apparently irrelevant network. That has clearly changed.

Ironically it is the data center that brought back networking relevance. Users at Interop are trying desperately to understand how to morph their networks to provide manageability and visibility of virtualized environments and deliver dynamic applications and data in a service-provider-style environment.

Networking track moderator Jim Metzler put it best Wednesday during the session “Breakthrough Network Technologies” when he said, “It wasn’t that long ago I thought networking was pretty staid. Not a lot was happening … Technology had gone from frame to ATM to MPLS … and there was no post-MPLS.”

Now talk has turned to implementing network automation in order to apportion dynamic compute resources and applications on demand. Users are asking for better visibility and management tools that work across physical and virtual networks.

Network security is a changed topic at Interop, with conversation focusing on application-specific strategies and the ability to monitor and prevent attacks across private and public networks in the cloud.

SLA is another buzzword as attendees are grappling with requests from their enterprises to ensure application stability and service provider-style services.

In most of these areas – automation, security, SLAs, it appears there are few solutions that satisfy networking teams. Automation is not broad enough and often doesn’t work in multivendor environments. It appears that networking teams are not ready to provide real internal SLAs and that service providers – Amazon, Google and Microsoft included – are unable to offer SLAs that satisfy. Security is ever evolving, but tools are far from able to offer the reporting and analysis networking pros need to entrust their data even to a hybrid cloud model.

Regardless of the unresolved issues, it is at least clear that the network is, and will continue to be, the lifeline of this emerging matrix of virtualized environments delivering dynamic data and applications. Now it is time for the network to meet the challenge.