Author: Tom Nolle

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?” …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

You have to love a market that, when faced with seemingly insurmountable contradictions in business and technology trends, proceeds to generate new ones unapologetically.  We had that yesterday with the story that Sprint was considering shutting down the WIMAX assets of Clearwire, then another story that Google might be aiming to be an MVNO.  So…

When I did my review of the Street’s view of consolidation in the service provider space, some of you wondered about the network equipment vendors.  After all, it’s hard to imagine how a buyer industry so pressed for profits it has to collapse into itself via consolidation could avoid putting some price pressure on its…

One of the inevitable results of commoditization is consolidation, and Wall Street (Oppenheimer in particular) has started predicting who among the “providers” in telecom might be acquired by somebody else.  It’s worth looking at their list of eaters and “eatees” to see what we can learn about industry direction. Top of everyone’s list is T-Mobile,…

There have been a number of commitments by network operators to new technologies like the cloud, SDN, and NFV.  Last week, Metaswitch earned its carrier stripes with a win in Europe, one of the first (of many, I’m sure) non-traditional IMS deployments.  Their stuff has been used in at least one NFV PoC. Verizon and…