Author: Tom Nolle

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…

Juniper just completed their SDN event at their partner conference, and as is often the case they haven’t made things easy for those who, like me, are charged with analyzing the result.  But we soldier on, and so let me jump right in. At the high level, Juniper’s SDN strategy is really a Network Functions…

RAD isn’t exactly a household word in SDN, but their CTO did a blog on SDN that raises some interesting points, particularly given that another vendor (Juniper) is scheduled to do an SDN announcement tomorrow. The first point in the RAD blog is that “SDN returns to centralized control as compared to a distributed control…

According to an FT article, EU telcos are mulling over the idea of sharing infrastructure rather than deploying multiple, interconnected, often competitively-overbuilt, national networks.  The move is partially a response to regulatory issues in Europe, where operators believe they are being asked to improve services and lower costs while their own costs are rising.  Some…

Cisco’s Videoscape has been literally everything, both in a positioning sense and in its mission and component count.  Operators griped about the fuzziness of the concept at the first announcement, but there are some signs that Cisco is starting to pull things together, and that could be significant for Cisco, as well as for a…