Author: Tom Nolle

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. …

Here’s a riddle for you.  What do Fedex and NFV have in common?  Answer:  Maybe nothing, and that’s a problem.  A review of some NFV trials and implementations, and even some work in the NFV ISG, is demonstrating that we’re not always getting the “agility” we need, and for a single common reason. I had…

The FCC finally released its neutrality order, causing such a run on the website that it crashed the document delivery portion.  Generally, the order is consistent with the preliminary statement on its contents that was released earlier, but now that the full text is available it’s possible to pin down some of the issues I…

I always think it’s interesting when multiple news items combine (or conflict) in a way that exposes issues and market conditions.  We have that this week with the Cisco/Microsoft cloud partnership, new-model servers from HP, a management change at Verizon, and Juniper’s router announcements.  All of these create a picture of a seismic shift in…

According to a couple recent surveys, TV viewing is dropping in the 18-34 year old age group.  Some are already predicting that this will mean the end of broadcast TV, cable, and pretty much the media World as We Know It.  Certainly there are major changes coming, but the future is more complicated than the…