The TMF event in Nice this week is a focus for an important issue in the evolution of networking, which is the way in which existing network and operations elements relate to newly introduced technologies like SDN and NFV. The Forum promoted its “ZOOM” project, which is aimed at modernizing OSS/BSS models and introducing (hence…
Author: Tom Nolle
How do Operators “Think of themselves as Software Companies?”
According to a Light Reading article yesterday, Metaswitch’s CEO told an audience at their service provider event that operators needed to start thinking of themselves as software companies. The comment provoked some backlash, on the grounds that it’s been said before. True, but it’s also true to at least to a degree that the comment…
Should We All Wear Platforms?
Read the stories about the IT world and you can’t escape a couple of truths. One is that hardware is commoditizing; IBM sold its x86 business and everyone is talking commodity servers. Another truth a bit harder to pick out but no less real is that platforms in the broader sense are definitely coming into…
Alcatel-Lucent: From Shift to Charge
Alcatel-Lucent became the latest network equipment vendor to announce their numbers, and the company made some very helpful progress in its “Shift” program to reorient its efforts into areas like mobile and IP, where future profit growth could be hoped for. However, it didn’t have a breakout quarter, and that’s not unreasonable given the early…
Wind River CGCS: How High Can You Go?
One of the (many) implicit contradictions in SDN, NFV, and even cloud deployment is the conflict between infrastructure capital cost and infrastructure TCO. The issues are created by a well-known truth, which is that it’s more expensive to make something work well than to just make it work. How much more? How good is “well?” …
Management/Operations: New Category or Category Eater?
Amdocs, the giant OSS/BSS provider, turned in a good quarter last week. Operations software is a long way from glamorous, but it’s also a long way from irrelevant—Amdocs’ quarter shows that. The relevance of OSS/BSS is one reason why it might play an important role in the evolution of service management and orchestration. The lack…
NFV Maturity: Is it (Gasp!) Coming?
Just after yesterday’s Overture Networks announcement on an NFV platform, we now hear from Light Reading that Edgewater Networks has launched a project to develop an SDN/NFV position. Today, we also had a revised submission of the CloudNFV Proof-of-Concept to the ETSI NFV ISG. Alcatel-Lucent has been promoting its SDN and NFV position on the…
Does it Make Sense to Unite Service Logic and Service Management?
I’ve blogged quite a bit about management and orchestration and the management challenges of next-gen services. Connection services are largely defined by their management challenges, since they connect users and experiences rather than creating features themselves. When we look at more advanced services, leading up to the cloud and SaaS, it’s a different matter. For…
What Amazon and Ericsson Say about the Triple Revolution
We in tech are clearly an industry in transition. How’s it going? That’s a question important to all, and at the same time hard to answer. Our only hope of tracking progress is to look at some companies who represent clear paradigm shifts and see if the paradigms are…well…shifting. Let’s try that today. Amazon reported…
AT&T and Juniper: Consistent Signals of an Uncertain Future
Juniper reported their numbers yesterday, and so did one of Juniper’s key clients, AT&T. Just a day before, AT&T had announced that Juniper (and Amdocs) were added to AT&T’s “User-Defined Network Cloud”. Now, some contrasts between the two companies’ reports create a worthy topic for analysis. When you read through Street analysis on AT&T, it’s…