The Cisco Pinnacle Awards - Strategic Impact Winner: ​​​​​​​SONiC

The Pinnacle Awards are Cisco’s top recognition, honoring contributions furthering Cisco’s legacy of technical innovation. Strategic Impact Award winners, SONiC, share their innovation.

ARAVIND SRIKUMAR: SONiC is essentially the Linux of networking. The server market went through a transition where multiple different operating systems kind of converged into Linux. We think, in the next, 5-10 years, networking is going to go through the same consolidation phase where multiple different operating systems from multiple vendors are going to converge. And that convergence is going to be towards SONiC. The product that we ship with is also shipping with an open-source version of SONiC. When customers get the box that we ship with SONiC, they have the flexibility to either run IOS XR or SONiC. We do that intentionally to allow customers the choice and flexibility they always get from Cisco.

VIJAY TAPASKAR: The innovation in SONiC has unlocked the speed of development in a network infrastructure base at web scaler customers. SONiC can only run in the simpler network in the backend data center backend network, where the flows and traffic are simpler. And the scope of the network is large, but the features required are very simpler. Because it's open source, they have a manageability model and network model, which are easier to adopt. And Silicon One Cisco 8000 brings that capability out to our customers using SONiC. So, we have a silicon innovation. SONiC is open source. Putting them together gets them to go faster.

MANI VEERACHAMY: Apart from all the technical complexity in developing this project, the biggest challenge that we faced is making Cisco as a credible open-source vendor. We went through a great deal of effort in rethinking fundamental aspects like how you show up in the open-source community, how you engage with your partners, vendors, and customers.

ARAVIND SRIKUMAR: We have generated north of $300 million in revenue. It's an open-source product. When it comes to the operating system, generating revenue out of an open-source product is an innovation by itself.

MANI VEERACHAMY: This project was incubated by a few passionate individuals and not through a regular DPL. It started as a simple learning exercise and quickly became a product proposal. This project would not have been possible without having 10 different functional teams across Cisco coming together, working as one team to deliver this.

ARAVIND SRIKUMAR: 50% of the product shipped out of the 8K family, when it comes to the number of units, are from SONiC. In order for Cisco to be technology, thought, as well as business leaders in the networking era of the future, it's essential that we develop and invest in SONiC.