The cloud is surely a popular topic with the media and also with enterprises, but despite the agreement of these two groups that the cloud is interesting, they don’t agree much on what exactly is happening with the cloud. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that they don’t agree about the future of the…
Author: Tom Nolle
Top Network Issues for 2016: My Personal View
We’re closing in on 2016 and what will surely be a pivotal year in terms of network operator strategy. I’ve already blogged about the results of the operators’ fall planning cycle, and I think that offers a pretty clear view of their technology plans. Because even the best of plans can be contaminated by internal…
What Can We Learn from the Light Reading NFV Tests?
Light Reading has published the first of what they promise will be a series of NFV tests, run in combination with EANTC, and the results are summarized HERE. I think there are some useful insights in the results, but I also think that there are fundamental limitations in the approach. I’m not going to berate…
APIs for NFV Operation: A High-Level Vision
There are a lot of technical questions raised by NFV and even the cloud, questions that we cannot yet answer and that are not even widely recognized. One of the most obvious is how the component elements are stitched together. In NFV, it’s called “service chaining”. Traditionally you’d link devices using communications services, but how…
What’s Ahead for NFV in 2016?
The fall is an important time for operators, because they have traditionally embarked on a technical planning cycle starting mid-September and running forward to mid-November. This is the stuff that will then be used to justify their budget proposals for the coming year. We’ve now finished that cycle for the 2016 budget, and I’ve been…
SDN/NFV: We Don’t Need Everything We Think, but We DO Need Some Things We’re Not Thinking Of
Revolutions have their ups and downs. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” said Tom Paine before the American Revolution, and the current times are probably trying the souls of many an SDN or NFV advocate. For several years, we heard nothing except glowing reports of progress in both areas, and now we seem…
A Look at the MEF’s “Third Network”
There are a lot of ways to get to the network of the future, but I think they all share one common concept. Services are in the eye of the beholder, meaning buyer, and so all services should be viewed as abstractions that define the connectivity and SLA they offer but are realized based on…
Looking Deeper into “Practical IoT”
IoT could well go down in tech history as the most transformational concept of all time. It will certainly go down as the most hyped concept. The question for IoT, in fact, is whether its potential will be destroyed by the overwhelming flood of misinformation and illogic that it’s generated. SDN and NFV have been…
What Does the SDN/NFV Success Track Through Mobile and Content Look Like?
I was talking yesterday with an old friend from the network operator space, a long-standing member of the NFV elite, and one of our topics was just what could pull through SDN and NFV. Two specific notions came up, one the Internet-of-Things opportunity I mentioned a number of times in my blogs (yesterday, for example)…
Taking a TMF/OSS View of NFV’s Business Case
I’ve pointed out in a number of my past blogs that of all the things needed from an SDN or NFV implementation to make the business case, none tops an effective service management automation approach. I’ve also noted that the NFV ISG initially put end-to-end management out of scope, and that they also ignored the…