Author: Tom Nolle

An important question in the NFV space is also a simple and obvious one; “What is a good VNF?”  This question is something like the rather plaintive question asked early in the NFV evolution; “Where do I start?” and it’s a close relative to the “What do I do next?” question that many vCPE pioneers…

There is absolutely nothing as important to a business as profits.  For large public companies in particular, profits are what drive stock prices and for the last decade they’ve also driven executive compensation.  If we want to understand businesses as a group, we need to understand how they profit.  Which is why some of the…

If my speculation is correct and operations vendors may take the lead in NFV, what happens to all the grand plans the technology has spawned?  Remember that my numbers show the ROI on an OSS/BSS modernization to improve operations efficiency and service agility is much better than network modernization based on NFV.  Would we strand…

You can’t have a market for next-gen tech without a business case for transformation.  As the famous saying of Project Mercury, the first step in the US space program went, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”  The news out of MWC, recent LinkedIn posts, and other more direct metrics are all showing that vendors and operators…

Cisco’s acquisition of CliQr (I hate these fancy multi-case names; they just make it harder for me to type and spell-check so I won’t use the name from here forward!) raises a whole series of questions.  Foremost, at the industry-strategic level, is the matter of the value of the hybrid cloud and how that value…

MWC generated a lot of ink, and some of the developments reported by Light Reading, SDx Central, or both create some nice jumping-off points for comments.  You’ll probably not be surprised if I have a different spin on many of the things I’ve chosen, and that I hope we can gain some overall sense of…

Experience teaches a hard school so they say, but difficulty aside, experience often teaches the only lessons that matter.  We’re starting to get some experience in the NFV space.  It’s not so much direct deployment experience, because little has really happened to drive the kind of NFV deployment that would serve as the model for…

One of the terms you hear more and more in networking is model.  We’ve already had a host of MWC announcements that include it (one of them I’ll blog about specifically tomorrow), and the concept of a model is pivotal in NFV and many cloud management systems.  If you read network rags, then you know…

In many of my past blogs I’ve talked about the question of operations transformation, and proposed that it be considered co-equal to network infrastructure transformation.  I’ve also noted that most network operators are weighing the question of how to go about operations transformation.  Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because operator views are driven by…

One of the lessons of the current earnings cycle is that if you’re a network operator you probably see the profitable side of your future in almost purely mobile terms.  For the last ten years, mobile revenues have been strong where wireline has been under pressure.  Mobile infrastructure has benefitted from investment priority during that…