Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…