Author: Tom Nolle

OpenStack is hot.  IBM is going to acquire Blue Box and Cisco is acquiring Piston.  You could look at this as a kind of consolidation signal, but I think it has other implications.  In fact, it might signal some SDN maturity, some NFV questions, and some cloud directions. OpenStack is obviously the premier approach to…

In a couple blogs last week I was critical of Alcatel-Lucent’s positioning of a new product (NSP) and their expressions of SDN/NFV opportunity in a white paper done in conjunction with AD Little.  I also raised questions about their positioning overall, and their ability to deliver on SDN/NFV benefit needs.  I had a chance to…

Hint:  It’s not how you think! HP is certainly at least one of the functionality leaders in the NFV race, and the fact that they’re an IT player is important to senior management at many operators.  They’ve won what’s arguably the most important NFV deal yet (Telefonica), and they’re on track to deliver convincingly on…

I often get emails on my blogs from network operators (and of course network vendors too, but those are another story).  One of the things I get from those emails that I find particularly fascinating is the difference in perspective on SDN and NFV between the pillars of power in operator organizations.  We talk all…

Pretty much everything these days is based on networking and software, which by current standards means that everything is SDN.  The trend to wash stuff with terms like SDN and NFV is so pervasive that you almost have to ignore it at least at first to get to the reality of the announcement.  So it…

Both SDN and NFV deal with virtualization, with abstractions realized by instantiating something on real infrastructure.  Both have management issues that stem from those factors, which means that they share many of the same management problems.  Formalistically speaking neither SDN nor NFV seem to be solving their problems, but there are signs that some of…

Here is an interesting question for you.  If the gazelle evolves, does the lion also have to change?  Of course, you’d say.  A food chain generates a chain reaction to any significant alterations.  Well, then, how about this one.  If network services evolve to something very different, does enterprise network equipment also have to evolve? …

There are reasons to do things and there are justifications and any CFO knows the difference.  In the last four blogs, I’ve talked about the value propositions for SDN and NFV, how they’re impacted by limited perceptions of the things SDN or NFV have to do, and the kind of holistic model that could define…

The question of how the network of the future could work, how SDN in particular could be introduced and managed, needs to be answered.  What’s really interesting is that it might have been answered already, and that not only are we not running to explore the solution, we might be running away. One of the…

I doubt anyone would disagree if I said that we had a strong tendency to oversimplify the impacts of changes or new concepts in networking.  It’s a combination of the desire by network users to focus on what they want not how to get it, and the desire of the media to turn every development…