Author: Tom Nolle

Alcatel-Lucent announced its new strategy, and frankly I was disappointed in the articulation—or at least the amount of stuff that got articulated.  The “Shift” plan to me so far states the obvious, and that makes it less obvious whether Alcatel-Lucent really has a long-term strategy that can save it. If you look at the high-level…

One of the more interesting M&A rumors is the story that AT&T had made a bid for Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, a move that was blocked (says the rumor) by the Spanish government.  Telefonica has since denied any overtures were made, and it seems likely that one or the other of these negatives would be…

There’s been some potential progress on a couple of fronts in the cloud, SDN, and NFV space (a space I’m arguing will converge to become the framework of a “supercloud”).  One is the introduction of Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS framework as a commercial offering, and the other a proposal to converge two different OpenFlow controller…

The notion of hosting centralized network functionality appeals to even enterprises, and operators positively salivate over it.  There is a potential issue, though, and that’s the performance of the servers that do the hosting.  Servers weren’t really designed for high-speed data switching, and when you add hypervisors and virtualization to the mix you get something…

Big Switch has announced its defection from Open Daylight, and the move has been greeted with all the usual “I-told-you-so’s”.  According to the majority who’ve commented so far, this is because Cisco contributed its open-source controller as a deliberate move to crush the business model of Big Switch.  Well, I don’t know about that. First,…

My biggest gripe about cloud coverage in the media is that we’re almost never talking about what’s really going on, but rather simply pushing the most newsworthy claim.  One result of this is that when something happens in the cloud space, even something that’s inherently newsworthy, we have no context of reality into which it…

If you assemble the “little stories” of the last week, looking past the big product/technology announcements, you see the indicators of an industry in transition—or one trying to transition at least.  To understand what’s happening you have to go back to the US Modified Final Judgment back in the ‘80s and look at the carrier…

We tend to think of SDN as being some modern revolution, but in fact there have been some pretty significant SDN antecedents in play for decades.  One, believe it or not, is in the VoIP space, and now this proto-SDN may be joining with the mainstream SDN wave through a vendor partnership. One of the…

Sorry I couldn’t blog the last couple of days; at some points I have to travel/work on a schedule that makes blogging impossible! This week we had HP’s earnings, and generally the Street liked what they got, which was better than they expected.  I’m sorry, Wall Street, but I wasn’t satisfied.  In tech, especially these…

Last week at Interop, Juniper offered a bit more detail on its Contrail stuff.  I didn’t get any press release on this, perhaps because Juniper has done a number of SDN announcements already and considered this a follow-up.  At any rate, the additional detail offers some color on what might distinguish Juniper’s approach from others. …