Nile Pushes GUGORaaS- Give Us Guaranteed Ongoing Revenue as a Service

(Please note- Nile has rescheduled their Mobility Field Day appearance to 2024)

This is being written BEFORE I strap my fine posterior into a sleek American aircraft and wing out to San Jose for Mobility Field 10 (I run in those circles, you realize). A few days from now I’ll be sitting in front of the networking vendor Nile at some point and hopefully hearing something of substance about their actual products. I say hoping because their web pages and articles about the company don’t actually tell me a lot beyond that they are evangelists for subscription-based revenue sent to convert me by the elders of the Church of Networking as a Service .

From what I can tell, next-gen BaaS (Buzzwords as a Service) is also in play with Nile. That’s my first takeaway as I try to learn about the company through the fog of promises of digital transformation and such.

Disruptive Simplicity

(Didn’t he win at the Kentucky Derby a couple of years back?) That seems to be an over-arching theme with Nile. As I read through their promotional and introductory pages, I think I’m supposed to embrace “pay us then keep paying us and you won’t really have to do much of anything ever again”. Sounds intriguing, yes? Here’s what bothers me now, today, as I look over the public-facing face of disruptive simplicity:

• I don’t see any actual products listed. No switches. No routers. No security appliances. No access points. Evidently you don’t get to lay eyes on that stuff until you engage with Nile (?) As a network engineer and architect, that rubs me weird. And not good weird, like Sam Clements grabbing my ass every year or so. There are lots of interesting feature-detailing white papers and such, just no mention of the specific building blocks.
  
• Something about the whole presentation just smacks of “innovation first and foremost now equals endless subscriptions and you’ll never actually own your network bits and pieces again.” Yeah, I know… capex vs opex blah blah blah”. I get it… we all live in that world now whether we like it or not. As us gray-hairs age out, the youngsters will have grown up thinking that subscriptions out the wazoo are swell- but sometimes it’s just presented in a way that us network geezers can’t help but bristle at. Both founders of Nile are former Ciscoers, and I’m guessing they were around when Cisco figured how how to make you rent what you also own and lots of blue-jackets wrote lofty blogs about “subscriptions = innovation”. Like there was no innovation before every mounting bracket and power cord started getting licensed? Pffft… whatevs. Yes we get that Silly Valley wants us to LOVE subscriptions. But that kinda feels like too much of the message here as I eyeball the company.
  
• I went looking beyond Nile’s site for their actual products. I never did find anything on that. But I did find a bunch of articles about how great Nile is for those on the money-making side of the IT equation. Like…
  
  Nile sells exclusively through partners. Like its technology, the company’s Connect partner program, also launched last week, emphasizes simplicity. There are no entry requirements or tiers, and all members regardless of size receive the same “very, very rich” margins, says Serlenga, who declined to specify what those margins are.
  
  Someone has to pay for Sting to serenade the CEO and for the rental of the amusement park at the annual party, I guess. Thank goodness for very rich margins.

Did I mention that you can’t see any Nile hardware on the web pages? Disruptive Omission.

I really hope that the upcoming Field Day presentation isn’t just a sales pitch for the NOTION of Networking as a Service, and that a room full of technical people will actually get to see some technical stuff.

But then again, maybe Nile will make us all irrelevant.