The impact of disruptive technology trends on networking hardware vendors

Abstract

The creation of the Internet has enabled the modern day technology economy. A critical component of the Internet is the routing and switching products that enable and support the movement of data through the Internet. These routing and switching products have enabled a networking market dominated by vendors of proprietary networking equipment. However, the Internet continues to grow rapidly, and this is putting pressure on the current architecture of these router and switch products. Alternative technologies and business models are being introduced to customers, changing the value proposition of proprietary networking equipment. This thesis provides a holistic analysis of the impact of the changing technology and business environment on the architecture of the current router and switch products, and the business implications for the vendors of these products. Academic frameworks and scholarly articles are used to analyze the value of the current architecture, and its ability to maintain the dominance of the incumbent vendors of proprietary networking equipment in the new environment. This analysis found that the current router and switch architecture is not flexible enough to support the growing demands of the Internet and corporate intranets. The value components of the proprietary architecture will be replaced by open and common versions of the same components, and then reconfigured to provide a novel and flexible architecture. As a result, the existing proprietary solutions will decrease in significance and a larger open ecosystem of software and hardware vendors will share the profits of the networking market. The vendors of proprietary networking equipment will be forced to adopt less lucrative business strategies to compete effectively in the new environment. A once dominant architecture and a source of tremendous value for these networking equipment vendors and their stakeholders will be replaced by an open architecture, resulting in the networking equipment vendors losing dominance in the market they created.