Click here to return to Enter the Octagon: Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX
Ali vs. Frazier, Hearns vs. Leonard, Liddell vs. Silva, and Rousey vs. Holm were, for various reasons, fights of epic proportions. Unlike those fights, the slugfest between VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI will continue for years to come. Here’s a look at the contenders’ vital stats:
| NSX | ACI |
|---|---|
| Number of customer wins | |
| 900 | 1,100 |
| Proportion of customers in production | |
| 15% to 20%* | 10% to 20%* |
| Launch date | |
| October 2013 | July 2014 |
| Origin story | |
| NSX grew out of VMware’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira Networks in 2012. | ACI’s roots date back to Cisco’s $863 million acquisition of Insieme Networks in 2013. |
* Gartner estimates
Smack talk
“The Cisco sales rep walks in and says ‘I’m going to sell you a switch.’ When they call me, I don’t have anything to sell, because I don’t sell switches. On the other hand, if I walk in and say, ‘I have a network virtualization solution running in the hypervisor, particularly vSphere, and it provides fully distributed firewall and all of these other services,’ Cisco doesn’t have anything.”
— Martin Casado, senior vice president, network and security, VMware
“What they [VMware] should do is figure out how to be cooperative in an open way, not in a proprietary way by locking down their APIs like they’re doing today. That’s done with multiprotocol BGP leveraging EVPN for VXLAN. We would be happy to work with VMware in that area.”
— Frank D’Agostino, CTO, Insieme Business Unit, Cisco
