Author: Tom Nolle

The consensus among network operators who provide either wireline or wireless broadband is that they’ll cross over on the revenue/cost per bit by mid-2017.  Given the time it takes to make any significant changes in service offerings, operations practices, or capital infrastructure programs, something remedial would have to begin next year to be effective. In…

Cisco beat estimates in its quarter, coming in about where I’d suggested it might overall.  The Street is happy with the results, which they should be, and the question now is how the details of Cisco’s performance might signal us toward a view of the next year. I think one key statement from the call,…

Wall Street will be watching Cisco on their earnings call this week.  I will to, and so should you all, but probably with a different set of goals and looking for signals only slightly related to the Street interest.  Cisco is an important player whose behavior will tell us a lot about the timing and…

Arista’s quarterly results might be showing us something important about the evolution of networking.  The company reported stronger-than-expected revenue, but what surprised many on the Street and in the media was the comment that white-box switching wasn’t seen as competition.  That might even be why revenues were better than expected, I think. I also think…

Does the Street have it right when they say NFV could hurt Cisco?  A Barron’s blog suggests that SDN doesn’t pose much of a threat to Cisco but NFV does, citing a financial analyst’s report.  The perspective of Wall Street on tech is sometimes helpful because it exposes the issues that could drive stock prices. …

The question of how to secure SDN and NFV comes up all the time, and in my view it’s yet to be fully resolved.  I think we’re trying to achieve “security by dissection”, meaning that we look at things like VNFs or NFV Infrastructure and ask how to secure them.  Yes, you have to build…

I talked in my last blog about intent modeling in NFV, and today I want to look at extending intent modeling in two directions—into SDN (which is easy) and into management (which is less than easy).  I’m not going to recap the theory of intent models beyond a sentence, so if you didn’t read yesterday’s…

Sometimes our technologies are more defined by the stories told about them than about their realities.  SDN and NFV are no exceptions, and the full scope of mythology for either would take a lot more than a single article to cover.  Fortunately we can narrow the scope of myths (and blogs) by focusing on what…

If SDN and NFV are going to create market waves, the obvious question is whether vendors are going to ride them or be swept away.  Given the immature state of both technologies, there’s not a lot of clear indicators to read on that topic, but there do seem to be a few signposts emerging from…

The notion that things are changing, perhaps a bit too fast for comfort, is hardly a modern phenomenon nor one confined to tech.  One of my favorite poems (Arthur Guieterman’s On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness) starts with the provocative line “The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls of mastodons…are billiard balls.”  Change, and not…