Author: Tom Nolle

John Chambers said a while ago that the “white box” players were dead and that Cisco had at least helped to kill them.  This is the sort of Chamberesque statement that always gets ink, but we always have to dig into those sorts of statements.  “News” means “novelty” not “truth”. The whole white-box thing was…

It’s nice to have a sounding-board news trigger to launch a discussion from, and Oracle has obligingly provided me that with its Evolved Communications Application Server.  This is a product that I believe is driven by the same industry trends that Alcatel-Lucent’s Rapport is, and potentially could deliver services that could compete with Google’s Fi. …

Yesterday I blogged about the current state of our technology-side revolutions in telecom—SDN, NFV, and the cloud.  All three of these have taken a bottom-up approach to solving the problems of the industry, and while it’s premature to say that any have failed it’s certain that none have succeeded either.  The reason why, I suggest,…

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is one of several technologies that operators are hoping will improve their profit on infrastructure investment.  NFV itself was launched to reduce capex by substituting generic hosted functions for embedded-appliance-based functions.  NFV’s benefit expectations have evolved since to include, and even emphasize, operations efficiency and service agility. The evolution of expectations…

Apple “crushed estimates” according to the headline of a financial website, and they surely did.  In fact Apple turned in what was perhaps the first unabashedly great quarters of tech companies in the current earnings season.  iPad sales were slightly below estimates and some analysts thought outlook was less positive than the current quarter, but…

I’m a fan of the notion that the future of communications, in fact of applications, is contextual services.  I’ve used that term to describe applications/services delivered to users/workers in part or whole based on their geographic, social, or other context.  It’s not just a matter of answering a question, but a matter of understanding that…

The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent is clearly a consolidation.  The question is what the companies see as the end-game.  Consolidation is usually a market response to commoditization, to the loss of pricing power that comes when no meaningful feature differentiation is possible.  Consolidation can also be a step toward taking a leadership position in…

Oracle has started demoing their new NFV/orchestration stuff, and anything Oracle does in the space is important because the company represents a slightly different constituency in the NFV vendor spectrum.  They’re definitely not a network equipment player so NFV isn’t a risk to their core business.  They do sell servers, but that’s not their primary…

I’m continuing to work through information I’ve been getting from operators worldwide on the lessons they’re learning from SDN and NFV trials and PoCs.  The focus of today is the relationship between OSS/BSS and these new technologies.  Despite the fact that operators say they are still not satisfied with the level of operations integration into…

I blogged recently about the importance of creating NFV services based on an agile markup-like model rather than based on static explicit data models.  My digging through NFV PoCs and implementations has opened up other issues that can also impact the success of an NFV deployment, and I want to address two of them today. …