Author: Tom Nolle

The buzz with the Consumer Electronics Show is that everything gets to be connected, and that may or may not be a good thing.  It’s not surprising that we’d see a drive to connect; Cisco for example has been pushing it on the theory that anything that creates more traffic sells more routers.  The question…

All the talk about “cloud networking” and “virtual networks” and “software defined networks” seems to be diverging as often as converging, and I’ve talked about the “network model” issues that might be behind a good part of that.  There’s another factor worthy of mention, too, and that’s the perspective issue.  If you’re the cloud looking…

Some of the news bits I saw this week raised an interesting point (to me, at least), which is that they reflected an underlying point that was being overlooked.  So I want to look at them today, and ask “Why is it…..?” The top item is that big Netflix outage over the holidays.  Everyone knows…

Where are we with respect to SDN?  That’s a question a lot of people are asking, and that a lot of vendors are watching.  The answer, at least according to my survey this fall, is “We don’t know”, and that’s an important point to consider if you want to understand what might happen in the…

We’re at the end of 2012, a year many of us will remember less than fondly if for no other reason the politico/economic foibles in both the US and Europe.  Call it “The Year of Class Warfare” if you like, economically speaking.  We should also remember it as a very important transitional year, and if…

Light Reading is asking the question “Where is SDN Going?” today (http://www.lightreading.com/blog.asp?blog_sectionid=388&doc_id=228144&) and I’d like to propose we ask a broader question, which is “Where is the network going?” as we wind down 2012.  The reason is that SDN is a network trend being driven by network forces, and you have to get to the…

Gosh, somebody other than Cisco is doing M&A; that’s news in itself!  What may be even more interesting is that Google is selling off its Motorola Home business to Arris.  That creates a new competitor for Cisco, of course, but it may also speak volumes about how IP TV is going to evolve. All the…

Cisco’s decision to buy Linksys 9 years ago was hailed by most as an indication the company was going to expand into the hotter consumer broadband space.  It was clear to some at Cisco even then that margins on the business were going to be low, and so Linksys was a kind of arms-length business…

Alcatel-Lucent has secured the financing it needed to shore up its balance sheet and prevent a messy problem, but the company still faces the same demons it’s faced since the merger.  Those problems have been enough to stall a giant with the best strategic influence of all network vendors and the best strategic product set. …

One of the fascinating things about SDN is that it’s become even fuzzier than the cloud.  We can’t agree on anything about it these days, including the very basic question of how we’d recognize an SDN if we saw one.  This level of uncertainty is magnified when we have SDN-related announcements, because more often than…