Author: Tom Nolle

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…

Alcatel-Lucent, battered by high costs and declining revenues and by internal tension since the merger, is now going to have to get another CEO.  Ben Verwaayen is stepping down, having failed to turn the company’s fortunes around.  That he didn’t is beyond dispute.  Whether he could have is open to debate in my view, and…

The devil, they say, is in the details.  The difference between motion and progress, they say, is a sense of goal or destination.  Well, we have a couple of examples in the news that demonstrates the truth of these statements. We’re hearing more and more about a plan by FCC Chairman Genachowski that would use…

Tellabs has, like other network companies, seen its sales slide through the last couple of years, and also like other companies Tellabs has decided to cut back staff, drop a product, and focus on (you guessed it!) mobile and SDN.  The big question is whether it’s too late.  Tellabs had actually been focusing more on…

Here’s a question to ponder; “How is Blackberry like most vendors’ SDN strategy?”  The answer is “too late to the revolution”. RIM, who changed its name to “Blackberry” to reflect the market reality of where brand loyalty lies, is looking to re-launch more than a name.  They have the almost-insurmountable task of making their new…