Author: Tom Nolle

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…

I had a couple of very interesting discussions recently on SDN, and they point out what I think might be the emerging key issue for the whole concept.  That issue is whether SDN is about services or about protocols, and it’s been framed to me recently by discussions on the evolution of OpenDaylight. The central…

Cisco has long been an advocate of what I like to call “Chicken-Little” marketing; you run around yelling that the traffic sky is falling and expect operators to accept sub-par ROIs to do their part in addressing the issue.  Their “Internet of Everything” story has always had elements of that angle, but it’s also been…

Some time ago, the Linux Foundation in cooperation with the NFV ISG launched an initiative (Open Platform for NFV, or OPN) aimed at implementing the NFV specifications.  OpenStack has now launched a “Team” that has the same goals.  It’s not unusual for multiple groups to aim at the same target these days, both in standards…

One of the things about hot trends that my surveys tell me frustrates users is the tendency to talk about something but never really define it properly or explain how it would work.  We’ve all seen that with things like SDN and NFV.  It doesn’t have to be one of the super-revolution trends either; I’ve…