Author: Tom Nolle

The notion of AI agents is just the latest in the ongoing wash-with-AI process, but as usual there’s a grain of truth in all the nonsense. There are, to be sure, negative views on AI agents, but there are also some thoughtful pieces that, while they are likely victims of the normal survey bias problems,…

Networking is changing, and in every changing market the biggest pressure is applied to the vendors. You can’t sell the same old stuff when the buyer is moving on, and they surely are. There are some pressures that we could classify as systemic, meaning they don’t originate from a single thing but rather from gradual…

The DoJ finally, after making a totally nonsensical objection to the HPE/Juniper deal, followed up with a somewhat compensating irrelevant settlement deal, leaving things just about where they’d been before the whole mess began. But, of course, where that might be in an overall market sense is still up in the air. The CEOs of…

Remember the old film “Play Misty for Me”? Well, Juniper may be revising it to “Play Mist for Sales”, at least to channel players. In a June CRN article, their head of partner programs says “Our Mist AI native networking platform—it’s that gateway into predictable as-a-service growth because that for me is the future and…

The cloud providers, like everyone else, want to increase revenues. One path to that is to get more enterprise work into the cloud. Another is to get more new applications into the cloud, and it’s likely the easiest way to do that is to target the telecom vertical, who lags behind other verticals in cloud…

One of the hottest topics in telecom netops is the role AI could/should play, and whether that role would have a decisive impact on profits. To answer the question, there’s a tendency to just think about what AI can do, but obviously we have to match capability against requirements in order to assess benefits. How…

After I posted some comments on how I’d do 6G, as a software-architect type, I got a LinkedIn request and some operator requests via our user-only mailbox, to expand on the details, so here goes, along with a diagram. Let me start by explaining how this approach came about. In the early 2000s, I saw…

If you read my blog yesterday, you know my views on the importance of making telecom software into hosted functions. You might then think that the Ericsson/Google pact, covered by Light Reading, is proof this is already happening. A few have asked me about this, but I respectfully disagree with the “already done” theories. A…

I’ve been hearing a lot about telco 6G, and Nokia has published a blog on the recent advances in 6G formulation and the schedule of activity. The first market rollouts are scheduled in 2030, and in any world but telecom standards that would be more than enough time to suggest major changes be made. Obviously,…

Omdia publishes some nice research, and I found a recent piece, “Telco Software Evolution Survey—2025” to have some interesting implications I’d like to develop. I agree with the key points on the factors buyers consider most, but I’ve had many comments on OSS/BSS systems that I’d like to roll in with the buyer-interest material to…