This is another one of those days when you have a bunch of news items that reflect a common theme. What do Yahoo, OpenCompute, and AT&T have in common? They’re all about the business of networking. Yahoo reported another quarter of disappointment, which frankly should never have been a surprise given that there was nothing…
Author: Tom Nolle
CloudNFV Transitions from “Project to Product”
In October of 2012, an insightful group of network operators published the “Call for Action” that launched Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). I responded to that call with some suggestions, among which was a recommendation that a prototype be developed as soon as possible. Operators encouraged me to do that, and a project group came together…
Three Tales of One Cloud
We had a lot of news yesterday, news that I’m going to assert all adds up to cloud-driven change. To open this blog (since I’m a networking guy after all) I want to start with Juniper. The company had a decent quarter and while it’s guidance was cautious, the initial reaction of the market to…
Getting to the Bottom Line for SDN and NFV
One of the imponderables about the future of networking is how it’s going to be paid for. Nobody is going to invest in a network without ample return, which in financial terms means an ROI that’s at least equal to the investor’s current internal rate of return. There’s a lot of pressure to “boost benefits”…
A Deeper Look at IBM, Pre-Earnings
As we advance toward IBM’s earnings call on January 21st, and with additional news now out that IBM is again trying to sell off its x86 server business, it’s clear that we’re heading for one of those watershed moments. I’ve been associated with IBM products in some way for almost fifty years now, and watched…
Enterprise Networking and its Consumer-Like Future
There seem to be a lot of forces battering the enterprise networking space this year, and we’re only halfway through January. What makes things difficult is that many of these forces are kind of under the radar, at least in terms of the extent to which their impacts are obvious. They’re also embryonic; there are…
Looking for Optimization in All the Wrong Places
We’re all familiar with the notion of “layered networks” but one of the things that’s sometimes overlooked when considering these age-old concepts is that multiple layers often begat multiple connection topologies, service policies, and so forth. In today’s world we’re not thinking of layers as much in terms of protocol layers as in terms of service…
Can We Modernize OSS/BSS?
There have been a number of articles recently about the evolution of OSS/BSS, and certainly there’s pressure to drive evolution, based on a number of outside forces. Caroline Chappell, Heavy Reading analyst, has been a particularly good source of insightful questions and comments on the topic, and I think it’s time to go a bit…
Clouds, Brown Paper Bags, and Networking’s Future
I’ve blogged a lot about declining revenue per bit and commoditization of hardware in networking. The same thing is happening in IT, driven by the same mass-market and consumerization forces. You can’t sell a lot of something that’s expensive; Ford made the automobile real by making it cheap. So arguably networking and IT are getting…
Why Test-Data-as-a-Service is Important to NFV
Yesterday, the CloudNFV project (of which I am Chief Architect) announced a new Integration Partner, Shenick Network Systems. Shenick is a premier provider of IP test and measurement capabilities, and I’m blogging about this not because of my connection with CloudNFV but because the announcement illustrates some important points about NFV and next-gen networking in…