Author: Tom Nolle

I’ve been blogging that the SDN and NFV evolution we’ve been engaged with had been approached top-down instead of the other way around, things would have been different.  I offered a quick view of what top-down NFV might have looked like.  Of course, I know as well as you all that we can’t roll back…

Juniper had their earnings call yesterday, and the refrain was hardly unexpected given general market trends and Juniper’s recent earnings calls.  CEO Shaygan Kheradpir started by saying that the company had made significant progress and the disappointing results were due to “industry headwinds”.  That may be different words than the last Juniper CEO used to…

VMware reported its quarter, and while the company beat expectations overall, the report still raises several questions and doesn’t answer some of the bigger holdovers.  I’ve been talking about the “Novell effect” in prior blogs, and it’s obvious that VMware faces the risk of simply saturating its market.  While there are exits from that risk…

According to one of the financial pundits, “IBM needs revenue growth.”  Forgive me, but that’s not going to win any profundity ribbons, gang.  Every public company needs revenue growth unless it wants its stock to decline at some point.  Recognizing that is probably less useful than recognizing a blue sky on a clear day.  What…

We’re getting a lot of NFV commentary out of the World Congress event this week, and some of it represents NFV positioning.  Most network and IT vendors have defined at least a proto-plan for NFV at this point, but a few are just starting to articulate their positions.  One is Juniper, whose reputation as a…

Often in our industry, a new technology gets linked with an implementation or approach and the link is so tight it constrains further evolution, even sometimes reducing utility.  This may have been the case with cloud computing and NFV, which have been bound from the first to the notion of harnessing units of compute power…

I’ve talked in previous blogs about the value of a top-down approach to things like NFV, and I don’t want to appear to be throwing stones without offering a constructive example.  What I therefore propose to do now is to look at NFV in a top-down way, the way I contend a software architect would…

I noted yesterday that HP’s decision to break itself into two companies would likely increase pressure on Cisco to fragment as well, pressure that began more than a decade ago.  Even then, the Street saw that switching and routing were low-growth businesses, which meant they’d tend to tie better product segments to the ground and…

There was a time when “synergies” were a big thing in tech.  The notion of a company as a one-stop shop was considered to be both a plus from a sales efficiency perspective and a means of creating pull-through by artfully constructing feature lists on loosely related products.  No more, apparently.  The Street has been…

The Open Platform for NFV initiative appears to be getting up steam, with the support of vendors and network operators alike.  I’m a long-standing fan of open-source software and a specific advocate of it in the NFV space (see my ExperiaSphere project), but while there are some hopeful signs in OPNFV so far I’m still…