When I speak to customers across different market segments they want the ability to deploy services at speed, at scale, at the lowest cost possible. They care about openness to drive rapid innovations in their environment. They want the ability to automate and drive operations cost down and transform to cloud economics. They want to scale their architecture in an open multi-vendor environment that can be managed at velocity in a simplified agile manner without any compromise on security or compliance. They want to be able to provision and apply policies across the entire infrastructure without the cumbersome or possible errors that may jeopardize security and business uptime. And as they run physical and virtual workloads, they want an infrastructure that is transparent and enable these workloads to reside anywhere without restrictions on movements.

Does whitebox switch model help these customers in that journey? Cisco's Frank D'Agostino sat down with Forrester Andre Kindness to discuss this topic.

In addition, Forrester issued a report "Myth of White-Box Network Switches" that breaks down the math of whitebox and hidden costs associated with it.