Author: Tom Nolle

Well, the report on PC sales has pretty well demonstrated that we do have a new dynamic in terms of “personal computing”, a dynamic in which the device that took its name from the concept is falling out of favor.  This is coming about because a seemingly small force–mobility–is driving a systemic change in human…

Can it be done?  That’s a question that I’m sure gets asked a lot in our industry.  We see or hear a news item or claim and we ask “the question”.  Part of the prevalence of this favorite question is the cynicism bred of years of hype, of course, but part is also a reflection…

We’re coming into that wonderful quarterly ballet that the financial industry calls “earnings season”, a bit of a misnomer given that we actually have four of them any year.  Nomenclature notwithstanding, this is a good time to look at the health and ecosystemic pressures of tech overall.  We’ll be getting at least a snapshot of…

Alcatel-Lucent finally did their SDN announcement, and it was in most ways a major step forward for SDN, perhaps the biggest step taken by any of the vendors so far.  However, as is often the case, the articulation may not do justice to the technology.  In fact, in many ways the material was downright murky,…

Alcatel-Lucent is scheduled to announce it’s “data center SDN” vision next Tuesday (April 2nd) and the announcement may well be one of the most important in the company’s history from the perspective of addressing a compelling need.  Whether it will be important in the sense of moving the SDN ball forward, even in the specific…

Software giant Oracle surprised the Street with a pretty major miss on their top line, sending their stock tumbling in the after-market yesterday and pre-market today.  The truth is that the Street may be underestimating the questions here, because all of the indicators for the tech space says that Oracle should be doing better.  Software…

Some of Cisco’s bigwigs have been talking SDN at the Cisco Tech Editor’s conference, and the sum of their perspectives validates our view that Cisco’s plan for SDN is to seize its benefits without embracing much of its technology.  Before you decide I’m off on another rant, let me add that I think that’s perfectly…

Well, it’s “Recap Friday” again, and fortunately there are quite a few sound bites we can recap this week.  At the top of the list is the Credit Suisse report on their Next-Generation Data Center Conference.  Like most of these conferences, it was a vendor love-fest littered with the usual exaggerations (and perhaps a few…

The EMC/VMware dog-and-pony show on the Pivotal Initiative may be a kind of turning point for the cloud, or more correctly it might be the second of two turning points.  It’s certainly going to be a key element in the forward planning of the players, and in my view it’s possibly the beginning of market…

We’ve not had much in the way of explicit vendor positioning for Network Functions Virtualization, despite the fact that my model says it will likely have more of an impact on the network equipment market over time than SDN will.  Server network middleware optimizer 6WIND had the first positioning of NFV I’ve seen, and Ericsson…