Author: Tom Nolle

It’s hard not to see the VMworld show as anything other than a VMware-versus-Cisco extravaganza, partly of course because that’s how it tends to be portrayed in coverage.  Underneath, there is surely good reason to see the networking developments in particular as being contra-Cisco, but I wonder whether there’s more to it.  Cisco might be…

There’s a popular view that as we move into the future, operators will build networks from commodity/commercial off-the-shelf servers (COTS) rather than specialized network equipment.  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the poster child for the notion, and there have been a flood of announcements from vendors who have made hosted network functionality available under the…

HP reported its results and the numbers were favorable overall, with the company delivering year-over-year revenue growth for the first time in three years.  The only fly in this sweet ointment was that the great majority of the gains came in the PC division, which saw a 12% increase in revenue that management attributes to…

Yesterday I talked about the views of a particular operator on NFV trials and evolution, based on a conversation with a very knowledgeable tech guru there.  That same guru is heavily involved in SDN evolution and it’s worthwhile to explore the operator’s SDN progress and directions. A good place to start is with the focus…

Networking has, for decades, seemed to advance based on changes in how we do stuff.  We progressed from TDM to packet, from SNA to IP in business networks, and now we’re moving (so they say) from legacy IP and Ethernet to SDN and NFV and from electrical to optical.  Underneath this seeming consistency is an…

Anyone who believes in “cyclical spending” or “refresh cycles” or “secular recovery” in tech should take another look at the numbers after both Cisco and IBM reported yesterday.  We are obviously in a general economic recovery and yet tech is stagnant.  As it happens, though, the same two companies’ reports offer some insights into what…

I’ve done a couple of blogs on SDN topics, but one of the important questions facing everyone who’s considering SDN is how it would fit in the context of NFV.  For network operators, NFV may well be the senior partner issue-wise, since NFV is explicitly aimed at improving capital efficiency, service agility, and operations efficiency…

The Service Architect Lifecycle tutorial I just completed for ExperiaSphere taught me a lot about management and orchestration for SDN, NFV, and the cloud.  There’s nothing like having to explain how something would be used to focus your attention on what needs to be done!  I don’t want to dive into all the issues, which…

Sometimes it seems like companies miss the simplest truths.  A market, over time, has to either change or stay the same, right?  Why then do we seem to have a problem accepting that in the networking space?  We presume change and static markets, seemingly, at the same time.  Juniper’s recent quarter, and the steps the…

IBM and Google both reported their quarterly numbers, with both companies beating on the revenue line but short on profits.  The markets this morning took disconnected view; IBM’s shares were off pre-market and Google was up, though both movements were modest. Google’s revenues beat slightly, with decent guidance, and this is probably what the Street…