Author: Tom Nolle

Cisco reported their numbers, which were much awaited and which the Street viewed as highly favorable.  The stock is up nearly 10% pre-market on the results, with both revenue and EPS beating estimates and guidance seen as generally good.  Given that most tech companies were weak this quarter, the results are impressive and you always…

Ericsson, Huawei, and NSN have entered into a somewhat-historic agreement to break down interoperability barriers for OSS/BSS systems.  OSSii is essentially an agreement to share interface specifications not to cooperate in broader development, or to set new standards for OSS/BSS interoperability (still largely under the TM Forum).  The promise is to facilitate rollouts of new…

It’s “recap Friday” again, and there are a lot of little items that (as usual) add up to some significant industry trends.  Facing important truths about something you depend on is never easy, and it looks like the industry as a whole and some companies in particular are now going to have to do that….

Light Reading made an interesting point yesterday in commenting about this year’s Interop show.  I’ve been to Interop in the past, and it’s always been the bastion of Big Network Iron.  Now it may be about to show its softer side, if you believe the advance comments on keynotes and vendor announcements.  Trade shows drive…

One of my previous blogs has generated a lot of discussion on the question of what the SDN market might be, and whether any market-sizing on the SDN space is simply an exercise in hype generation.  This comes at the same time as a series of articles, the latest in Network World, that cast doubt…

Alcatel-Lucent has been in many ways the leader among network equipment vendors in service-layer strategy.  Their notion of the “high-leverage network” and their focus on APIs and developers for next-gen services has been, in my view, right on the money (literally).  Their positioning of their concepts, and as a result their ability to leverage their…

The market giveth, and takes away, but probably in the main it’s the vendors’ own actions that make the difference.  We have an interesting proof point of that in two events yesterday—the end of the second NFV meeting in Santa Clara and the earnings call of Juniper, just down the road in the same town….

IBM delivered a rare miss in their quarterly numbers, and a significant one at that.  While the company seemed to focus on execution issues and delays in getting contracts signed rather than the usual macro-economic conditions tech vendors like to blame, I think the problems are deeper for IBM.  And for the rest of the…

We’ve already seen signs that mobile broadband is gutting at least the near-term PC sales, signs that Intel’s quarterly numbers only confirm.  We have lived for over thirty years in the personal computer age, and PCs have transformed just about everything in our lives and in business.  Now they’re dinosaurs.  My point is that if…

One of my biggest frustrations about SDN has been the lack of a complete top-to-bottom architecture.  All of the focus seems to be on the SDN Controller, and that’s an element that is a little functional nubbin that lies between two largely undefined minefields—the lower-layer stuff that provides network status and behavior and the upper-layer…