Author: Tom Nolle

Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn may have caught my creation of a LinkedIn Group called “CloudNFV”.  Even though the group is currently invitation-only I’ve received many requests for membership, and a select few found the CloudNFV website and figured out a bit of what was going on.  Craig Matsumoto of SDNCentral was…

We all think that networking is changing, and most probably agree that 1) the cloud is the primary driver, and 2) SDN is the term we use to describe the new “connection architecture”.  I think that the point-three here is that NFV is the cloud-platform architecture that will describe how the hosted network elements are…

One of the challenges that wireline has faced (and it doesn’t need all that many challenges for gosh’s sakes!) is the “capacity gap”.  If anyone thinks broadband Internet is profitable enough, you need to read somebody else’s blog.  You need to deliver video, HD video, to make wireline work, and that’s a problem because traditional…

Well, we’ve seemed to finally get beyond the rumor phase with NSN.  Nokia has offered to buy Siemens out of the joint venture, one of several possible outcomes that I’d heard rumors on over the last several month.  The big question is whether this will matter to NSN or to Nokia, and that depends on…

It’s been an interesting week for the markets, in all of the dimensions that drive us forward.  There are glimmers of technology change in SDN, there are signs of vendor shifts, and there are macro indicators that might tell us a bit about demand.  So, given that it’s Friday and a good day to take…

Cisco’s comments on its new “Application-Centric Infrastructure” vision is yet another proof point for my argument that Cisco has successfully played the weaknesses of SDN players against them.  In military tactics, seizing the high ground is a maxim.  So it is in marketing, and Cisco has done that with finesse. You can harp on about…

The SDN game never ends, possibly because nobody wants to diss a good market hype wave while it still has momentum, and possibly because there’s still room to do something useful given the rather vague utility of some current strategies.  In any case, PLUMgrid has joined the fray with an offering they call “Virtual Network…

Cisco has used its Cisco Live event to buttress its Open Network Environment and the onePK API set that’s designed to address the SDN and NFV space.  In the move, Cisco is showing us why they’re able to grow sales when others are under pressure, and also why the notion of a network revolution isn’t…

Who’d have thought that Google and Facebook and Netflix might be the face of competition for network vendors?  Well, it’s happening, and while the risk isn’t acute at this point for reasons I’ll get into, the actions of these three OTT giants is a symptom of the issues that face networking and network equipment. Google…

With IBM announcing a bunch of “C-suite” analytics tools designed for the cloud and GE getting into big-data analytics, it’s hard not to think that we’re deep in the “build-the-buzz-meaning-hype” phase of big data.  Well, did we expect the market to be rational?  After all, we’ve pretty much washed every erg of attention we could…