Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…