Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…