Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I’ve blogged through all of 2013 that of our three “revolutions” of cloud, NFV, and SDN, it’s the cloud that’s the senior partner.  The transformational aspects of SDN and NFV depend to a very large degree on our harnessing cloud capabilities to host network features.  We’re also hearing that Amazon is on a tear, with…

    Well, it’s 2014 and so it’s a good time to match up the looking-ahead and looking-back parts of analyzing our industry.  One good way to do that is to look at how the network vendors’ stocks have fared in the last year.  If you go to any of the financial sites and run…

I’ve blogged in the past on how the Street views various companies or even the networking industry, and today there’s been an interesting report by equity research firm Cowan and Company about how SDN and NFV will impact the market.  This is the outcome of the company’s Trend-Spotting Conference and it includes some industry panel…

It’s pretty clear to me from comments I’ve gotten in my blog that there are a lot of questions out there on the topic of management or operations.  When we talk about things like SDN and NFV we can talk about management practices in a general way, but we can really only talk “operations” if…