Author: Tom Nolle

Wall Street has been framing Cisco’s recent technology announcements as less technology than business.  The thesis is that Cisco sees the future as being revenues from services and a subscription model, rather than from hardware.  This, in response to industry efforts to create commodity hardware platforms and in the growing tendency of buyers to keep…

There has been a lot of recent discussion about SD-WAN technology and its potential.  Not surprisingly, most of it has been marred by our industry tendency to over-generalize, to seize on a term that describes a host of options and presume that all the options are really the same.  SD-WAN is really important, but not…

After my blog on Cisco’s intent networking initiative yesterday, I got some questions from operator friends on the issue of modeling.  We hear a lot about it in networking—“service models” or “intent models”, but typically with a prequalifier.  What’s a “model” and why have one?  I think the best answer to that is to harken…

Back in the days of the public switched telephone network, everyone understood what “signaling” was.  We had an explicit signaling network, SS7, that mediated how resources were applied to calls and managed the progression of connections through the hierarchy of switches.  The notion of signaling changed with IP networks, and I’m now hearing from operators…

In past blogs, I’ve said that there were three dominant drivers for transformational change in networking.  One is carrier cloud (which of course has its own drivers), one is 5G, and the last is IoT.  Given that the industry is fast-paced, it’s a good time to look at where we stand on each, based on…

If networks are truly software-defined, what defines the software that defines them?  This is not only the pivotal question in the SDN and NFV space, but perhaps the pivotal question in the evolution of networks.  We knew how to build open, interoperable networks using fixed devices like switches and routers, but it’s increasingly clear that…

We seem to be in an “everything as a service age”, or at least in an age where somebody is asserting that everything might be made available that way.  Everything isn’t a service, though.  Modern applications tend to divide into processes stimulated by a simple event, and processes that introduce context into event-handling.  We have…

Sometimes words trip us up, and that’s particularly true in tech these days.  Say we start with a new term, like NFV.  It has a specific technical meaning, but we have an industry-wide tendency to overhype things in their early stages, and vendors jump onto the concept with offerings and announcements that really aren’t strongly…

I mentioned Brocade and its Vyatta virtual router yesterday, as a proof point that perhaps we have too simplistic a view of the value of “virtualization” in operator transformation.  I want to go into the story in more detail now, because there’s a lot of important stuff to be learned. One of the most important…

Transformation is hard.  That’s perhaps a simplistic way of summarizing all the things I’ve learned and heard over the last two months, but it certainly reflects operator views.  Transformation based on technology changes is so hard, in fact, that a growing number of operators (at the CxO level) aren’t convinced any more that it’s even…