We have a couple of important developments on the business side of networking that taken together could signal something significant—but not unexpected. Intel reported numbers that were just consistently good, and Apple and IBM are entering into a mobility partnership. The common thread offers some insight into what’s really happening with the cloud, the PC,…
Author: Tom Nolle
The Path to “Service Agility” and “Operations Efficiency”
Over the last year, we’ve seen a significant transition in expectations for things like SDN and NFV that are aimed at transforming networks. Where once it was believed that moving to white-box switches and functionality hosted on cheap servers was a major driver of change, it’s now broadly accepted that something else has to drive…
Making Spaghetti Out of SDN, NFV, and the Cloud
Everyone surely knows the old saw about the difficulty in pushing spaghetti uphill, and it occurs to me that we’re in danger of trying to do something very like that with changes created by SDN and NFV, perhaps even the cloud. The expression is usually applied to tasks that are made difficult not by the…
Broadcom’s Hybrid Hardware: Right Idea but Wrong Target?
According to a decent interview/story in Light Reading, Broadcom has an NFV strategy (no surprise) and it’s one that favors the notion of a hybrid technology approach, augmenting COTS with specialized technology to enhance performance (no surprise there either; they make the stuff). But just because you’re opportunistic doesn’t mean you’re wrong, and there are…
Metaswitch Takes Another Big NFV Step
In the hype-ridden NFV space, Metaswitch has always stood out for me as a voice of both reason and experience. As the founder of the Project Clearwater open-source IMS project, they’re knowledgeable about cloud-based carrier functionality and open-source at the same time. As a member of the CloudNFV™ group they are one of the few…
Cisco, SDN Competition, and the “Home Field Advantage”
Credit Suisse has some interesting data on the data center switching market, and I think it’s particularly interesting when you look at in light of the overall weakness in IT spending that Gartner previously reported. It also raises some points about SDN evolution and what can be expected there. First, the data center is the…
An Open Letter on Open NFV and SDN
We continue to have a lot of discussion around the use of open-source technology by network operators in NFV and SDN applications. Obviously, the majority of the SDN spectrum is already covered by open source (OpenDaylight for example) and there’s no shortage of open source in NFV either, with OpenStack, Linux, and so forth. Why…
Forget IoT; Think “Cloud of Things”
The “Internet of Things” is one of those concepts that starts with at least a grain of truth and gets enveloped in the inevitable wave of hype. We seem, as an industry, to be incapable of addressing anything that’s not characterized by a hockey stick growth estimate and an ever-expanding-and-less-precise definition. The problem is that…
Can Oracle Turn Micros into a Cloud Play?
We hear this morning that Oracle is going to buy Micros Systems, a primary provider of software to retail/hospitality users. What should we think? Well, everyone knows the “Law of Large Numbers”, and most know that the term is applied to so many things it’s fair to say there’s a “large number” of the laws. …
Wind River’s Ecosystemic Solution to NFV and Orchestration
I blogged just yesterday about the possibility that the competitive dynamic in the orchestration space would be changed by Cisco’s Tail-f deal. Since then we’ve had another announcement in the space, this one from Wind River. The company’s NFV approach has a lot of good about it, a singular issue I’d like to see them…