Author: Tom Nolle

Everyone knows that operators and enterprises want more service automation.  Some classes of business users say that fixing mistakes accounts for half their total network and IT TCO, in fact.  Nobody doubts that you need something to do the automating, meaning that software tools are going to have to take control of lifecycle management.  A…

Cisco did their expected cloud announcement yesterday, but it wasn’t exactly a complete picture of Cisco’s cloud intentions.  It was at least a better picture of what Cisco is doing than the media has been able to muster, though.  For example, it’s pretty obvious that their investment of a billion dollars in “the cloud” isn’t…

I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out what my blog today would be about.  Netflix’s CEO has blogged and made some strong comments about the need for a very broad interpretation of “net neutrality”.  Netflix in fact wants something even more “neutral” than the FCC order that was overturned on appeal would have provided. …

In a previous blog, I talked about two models of “SDN federation”, one that was at the service level and one that was at the “SDN” or controller level.  One obvious difference between the two is that the former requires some specific service, whose interworking features then drive the federation process.  If you wanted to…

We’ve gone through a whole series of industry events that swirl around the notion of the next-gen network.  I’ve blogged a bit about the TMF, NFV, SDN, and fiber conferences, and as people comment on the LinkedIn posts relating to the blogs it’s interesting how often the discussions end up on the topic of “operationalization”. …

I made a comment in an earlier blog about “orchestration” in the context of service chaining, and a few people messaged me saying they thought the whole orchestration topic was confusing.  They’re right, and since it’s very important for a wide range of things in tech these days this is a good time to try…

We seem to be in the heart of a true avalanche of industry events, and that always creates a parallel avalanche of news.  There’s always the question of whether a given news item is actually relevant, of course, and I thought it might be helpful to look at optical networking before the action gets underway. …

I promised some of my blog readers that I’d do a deeper dive into the current state of NFV implementations.  One of the challenges that poses is defining just what an NFV implementation is, because NFV means different things to different people and because there’s an ungodly amount of NFV hype out there.  Another challenge…

SDN is the senior partner in the reformation of the network, and this week’s ONF event makes it certain that SDN will be getting more attention.  There’s no question that operators are working hard on applying SDN to address their problems and opportunities, but it should be clear to everyone that SDN is also a…

Most of you probably aren’t old enough to remember the song “Three Little Words” and I won’t bore anyone who’s not interested enough in the source of my blog topic by recounting the lyrics.  They don’t apply in any sense to my topic today, other than that I’m proposing three different three-word triads and weaving…