Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…