At the end of last week, Cisco’s OJ Winge published a blog announcing that the company would cease investments in its Cius tablet. Does this mean it’s end-of-lifing it or killing it as I’ve read in many of the press articles? No, it does not.

In fact, if you read the rest of the blog post, Winge states that Cisco would continue to support the existing base of Cius tablets (which is small) and make the Cisco-branded tablet available to a handful of customers that require a ruggedized, corporate-first tablet. With that being said, the fact remains that we won’t be seeing the Cius tablet in the hands of your doctor or at Best Buy any time soon as it’s not a big focus point for Cisco.

Sometime in the past month Brocade stealthily launched a community forum (community.brocade.com/openscript) for its ADX Application Delivery Controller (ADC).  The Brocade forum will be powered with Brocade’s OpenScript Programming Engine, which is a PERL-based scripting interface to allow Brocade ADX administrators to create custom functionality for its service provider customer base.  

The use of PERL is a good decision for Brocade as it’s well adopted in service provider environments today so the barrier to entry should be fairly low.  As powerful as PERL is though, the real leverage with this announcement will be from the OpenScript Community.  

The community allows Brocade administrators to ask each other questions, share scripts and collaborate with one another.  In essence the community site facilitates conversations and collaboration between customers that have deployed ADX.  If executed on correctly, the community can create value for all Brocade customers.