Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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,…