Simplification is certainly among the top factors that make or break a product or service in IT these days. Docker, Inc. has been a huge success, because it makes application development and deployment accessible to people without a ton of expertise. Now some are looking at the container technology that made Docker the darling of the industry and applying it outside of applications.

Lauren Cooney, senior director of strategic programs, Chief Technology & Architecture Office, at Cisco Systems, Inc., said that within her company, they are exploring that possibility. “One of the things we’re looking at at Cisco is you can actually take network functions across the orchestration layer and containerize those,” she told John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.

“It’s actually a more scalable way to drive applications and services across platforms even at the networking level,” she said. The takeaway, she explained, is that the expertise bar for network functions could be significantly lowered by containerization, and thus networking could be the next area of IT to be “democratized.”

Big jump in open source

Cooney said that Cisco has made a big jump in open-source involvement — from three projects to 23 now. “And it’s across the company too,” she said. “Everyone wants to do open source, whether it’s submitting to GitHub, whether we’re actually donating code through foundations — there’s a lot of different things that we’re looking at doing.”

She added that Cisco has an open-source story unfolding within its own operations. “We’re looking at new ways to replace some products that may be proprietary with open solutions,” she said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Open Cloud Architecture Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE