Author: Tom Nolle

Well, it’s catch-up Friday today, and there are a number of items that cropped up this week but didn’t make the cut for dedicating a blog entry.  If you put them together you can see some forces acting to create industry change—not in a giant push but in nibbles. There’s a report that FCC Chairman…

It’s always fascinating to get a Wall Street view of networking, so I was happy to review the William Blair tech outlook.  While I don’t always agree with the Street, they certainly have capabilities that I don’t in analyzing the financial trends.  Even where we disagree, there’s value in contrasting the Street view with the…

“Cable” has always been seen as different from “telecom”.  The industry is regulated differently, it’s primary profit sources are different, it has very different infrastructure, and it’s OSS/BSS/NMS tools and strategies are also different.  Most insiders in the SDN world say that cable operators are less interested in SDN than telcos, and virtually everyone says…

Stories about network transformation tends to focus on capex, despite the fact that network operators have consistently indicated that opex is likely more important.  One reason for this is that opex is one of those giant fuzzball sort of areas where you can make almost any claim and get the numbers to work in your…

Cisco turned in a disappointing quarter, one that screams “Networking isn’t what it used to be!” for all with even mediocre ears.  Juniper named a new CEO, one that the Street speculates may have been picked to squeeze more value for shareholders by cutting Juniper’s operating expenses.  Such a move would seem to echo my…

The NFV ISG released its first public documents in early October, but the most significant release was the details of its process for proof-of-concept demonstrations.  PoCs are one of the things that I’ve believed from the first would be essential in making NFV a reality.  Specifications don’t write software, and I think the IETF has…

One of the interesting things that emerged from the SDN World Congress was the multiplicity of roles associated with the concept we call “deep packet inspection” or DPI.  Like almost everything in tech, DPI is being positioned or proposed in more missions than we have methodologies to support.  I had an opportunity to spend quite…

The future is one of those things that always gets ahead of us.  Companies today are particularly challenged with futures because financial practices focuses them on quarterly results.  Still, while the future may be redefined daily and may be hard to come to terms with, it’s either there for us all or we don’t have…

One of the things I found interesting about the SDN World Congress last week was that it asserted, in effect, that the whole wasn’t the sum of the part but rather than one part was good enough to make it.  Anyone who had “network”, “function” or “virtualization” in any form erected the great banner of…

Here at SDN World Congress, just a year ago, ten global operators created the framework of NFV with their Call For Action paper, and a new white paper was released here that renews and refines that call.  I had the opportunity to read the new paper and to talk with many of those who authored…