Author: Tom Nolle

Mobile is not only the hottest spot in service provider infrastructure, it’s probably the only hot spot.  Mobile profits and revenues still show some glimmers of hope even though ARPU is expected to plateau late this year and start its slow decline next year.  My model says that operators are looking to make some smart…

I’ve been looking at the impact of the cloud, SDN, NFV and all of the rest of the growing list of acronyms.  My focus has been on the network equipment side, and the vendors who supply it, but there’s another piece of the puzzle, the IT side.  Whatever functionality leaves purpose-built network devices arrives somewhere…

You’re familiar by now with my rants on how we’ve decomposed ecosystemic shifts like the cloud, SDN, and (eventually perhaps but hopefully not) NFV.  What has to be considered as a whole new cooperative model for IT and networking is instead being looked at as a bunch of disconnected product changes that might lead to…

Sometimes you look for the wrong monsters under the bed.  IBM made an announcement today demonstrating that’s true in networking, and in two dimensions.  They came out with specific support for Network Functions Virtualization and they announced a successful partnership (with Connectem) to field virtualized mobile core infrastructure for Optus in Australia.  This shows that…

MWC is kicking off today, and operators tell me their own hope for the show and for the year is a strategy to raise revenues and profits.  Well, I’m a poetry fan, and so I offer a snippet of a poem to guide them through their perusal of vendors’ wares, from John Keats: Heard melodies…

MWC is nearly upon us, so it’s not surprising that we have more mobile-related news than usual.  In fact there are a couple of stories that offer not only the usual mobile/product slant but also say something about the companies making the announcements and the market they’re trying to address. The first announcement was from…

In my blog yesterday I talked about the risks to SDN, with the largest being a disconnect between SDN missions and SDN implementations.  I got a couple of emails asking just what “SDN missions” might be, and I think that’s a fair question.  Missions reflect a benefit case, after all, and benefit cases are needed…

Brocade announced its earnings yesterday, and they generally exceeded Street estimates.  I was interested in their quarter and their comments on it because Brocade is arguably the first of the second tier in network vendors, a player with a real chance to become a giant if they play their cards right. The key comment from…

It’s nice to have some good news on the SDN front.  Ericsson took the opportunity to present their SDN strategy to me as a ramp-up to demonstrating some of the key elements at MWC in Barcelona the week of Feb 25th.  They also announced a cloud strategy that included support for OpenStack, which is important…

Mellanox Technologies just announced a couple of “data center connect” systems designed to allow companies to use fiber to link InfiniBand switches to create linked “cloud” data centers at distances of up to about 50 miles.  This development makes what I think are two key points about cloud computing; first, we need to think outside…