Author: Tom Nolle

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…

Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I’m a believer in the thesis that the cloud changes everything.  Yes, I believe it’s over-hyped (what isn’t these days), but it represents the reformulation of the partnership between networking and information technology, and in particular it provides the framework for us to direct…

Microsoft and Juniper both reported their numbers yesterday, and when I looked at their stocks pre-market it happened that both were up exactly the same percentage. Interesting because both companies’ future literally depends on the cloud, and neither company is fully exploiting that reality. Microsoft’s Windows numbers were up for the quarter and off for…

Tech got some semi-good news in two earnings reports yesterday, from Google and IBM.  I insert the “semi-“ because the quarter measures the past, which is only an indirect indicator of the future.  The most significant insight from the reports is that the politically driven economic slump we had in the holiday period last year…

The notion of “revolution” is always exciting, sometimes useful, occasionally destructive.  The notion of two or three of them at once tips the scales into the latter category in my view.  We have been looking at “the cloud revolution” for several years, we’ve just started “the SDN revolution” and now we’re facing “the NFV revolution”. …

We filed comments with the operators who generated the white paper on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and I’ve referenced those comments in posts this week.  I’m not sure how to find them in the NFV site or whether everyone has access to that site, so I’m posting the material below.  This material can be freely…

I had noted in my blog on Juniper’s SDN announcement yesterday that we had covered the Juniper QFabric launch in early 2011 and had written an article on QFabric, the PTX, and its potential value in the cloud.  The article included comments on the potential for “service chains” similar to that offered in Juniper’s SDN…