Author: Tom Nolle

What will SDN and NFV be when they grow up?  That’s a question we often ask children, but infant technologies ought to be prepared to answer it too.  Kids don’t find answering easy nor do they get it right often, and it may be that technologies don’t do any better. If you define what you…

Barclays released a note on Cisco yesterday, based on an interview with David Ward, and there are some interesting comments and views, most of which I think are consistent with how I see Cisco’s evolution.  The key point, I think, is that in a technical sense Cisco is moving to become a cloud company in…

I noted yesterday in my blog that vendors and operators alike were guilty of what might be called “Oldthink”, the practice of honing in on today’s problems through the mechanisms of past solutions and thus simply reinforcing the past instead of creating a future.  We have other examples of that phenomena today, and in other…

Ever since Blackberry turned in its abysmal numbers, stories have vacillated between “Blackberry goes private and becomes a 900 pound gorilla behind the cloak, then emerges to terrorize the industry” and “Blackberry gets bought by somebody who terrorizes the industry.”  You probably see the common denominator here.  Blackberry in any non-dead state is a terror…

We’re in the throes of one show involving SDN and NFV and in less than 2 weeks, the SDN World Congress event where NFV was launched in the first place will be underway.  It’s not surprising we’re getting a lot of SDN and NFV action, so let’s take a look at some of the main…

The world of SDN continues to evolve, and as is usually the case many of the evolutions have real utility.  The challenge continues to be the conceptualization of a flexible new network framework that exploits what SDN can do, and at an even more basic level provide the framework by which the different SDN models…

In mid-October the SDN World Congress marks the anniversary of the first NFV white paper’s publication.  SDN is far older than that, and the cloud is older still.  I attended a cloud conference last week, and while it was interesting and even insightful in spots, it’s pretty clear that we’re still missing a big part…

Well, the story now is that Blackberry is following Dell’s example and going private.  Certainly there are simple financial reasons for that, but I also have to wonder whether some of the same “SOX-think” I talked about with Dell be operating here too.  If there’s a turnaround in play for Blackberry it’s going to be…

We have software defined networks, software defined data centers, software defined servers.  What’s missing?  I contend it’s the most obvious thing of all; software designed software.  We’ve built a notion of virtualization and agility at the resource level, but we’re forgetting that all of the stuff we’re proposing is being purchased to run software.  If…

The world of SDN and NFV is always interesting, like a developing news story filled with little side channels and some major scoops.  One of the latter just came from RAD, whose “distributed NFV” raises what I think are some very interesting points about the evolution of the network. The traditional picture of NFV is…