It’s been close to a decade since Pankaj Patel stepped down from his role as EVP and chief development officer at Cisco. These days, the former Cisconian is focused on one thing: making enterprise networking less convoluted.
Patel, who initially joined the networking giant in 1996 by way of its acquisition of StrataCom, told IT Brew that being the “head chef of the kitchen” in the networking world allowed him to see how recipes “got messed up and the kitchen got dirty.”
“The incumbents thought that they have been doing all the right things for too long, and they kept on adding complexity by adding features after features and creating new functionality…whether somebody needed that functionality or not,” Patel said, adding that he feels traditional players have ultimately “lost sight” of the consumer desire for simplicity.
Now, the industry veteran is taking what he knows to disrupt the networking industry with his network-as-a-service (NaaS) startup, Nile. Patel co-founded Nile in 2018, alongside John Chambers, Sri Hosakote, and Suresh Katukam.
Big bets. Nile’s journey to making enterprise networking less complicated started at the engineer level. Patel told IT Brew senior engineers and architects were advised to take a minimalist approach when designing, a challenging task because “engineers by nature want to build features.”
“It was like putting them through religious conversion,” Patel said.
However, it paid off. Patel told IT Brew that customers are attracted to Nile for its simplicity. Under the NaaS model, businesses can rent networking services from a provider usually through a pay‑as‑you‑go subscription model. He estimates that Nile can eliminate 80% of issues that impact network reliability for clients.
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While the NaaS provider first caught the attention of startups, it has since grown to service universities, financial institutions, and more. Patel believes Nile will have a similar impact on the networking industry as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) had on the cloud computing industry. He told IT Brew that the startup was named after the Nile river for its “audacious vision” to achieve even more success than Amazon, which is also named after a river.
“We are trying to disrupt the 40-plus-year-old legacy paradigm and [are] doing what AWS actually did to computer storage,” Patel said.
NaaS era incoming? When asked if he believes the NaaS model could potentially upend the traditional networking industry, Patel told us that he believes the two will continue to coexist.
Brandon Butler, senior research manager of enterprise networks at IDC, echoed similar sentiments. Butler told IT Brew there has been an increase in both demand and supply of NaaS solutions. While Butler said that there is “a lot of pie” to go around for different vendors in the booming enterprise network market, he noted that only time will tell how emerging vendors will be able to compete against their legacy counterparts.
“The advantage that some of those big companies have is they have a lot of customers,” Butler said. “They have a lot of existing install base for their infrastructure. They have a lot of dedicated folks who you know are very experienced using those systems and platforms, as well.”