Author: Tom Nolle

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…

The big flap today is yet another resurfacing of the notion of an aggressive move by Apple into the TV space.  On one hand, the move seems not only logical but inevitable.  Apple’s future obviously depends on its ability to keep launching new spaces to counteract the fact that its high-end model will always lose…

I want to wish all those who have read my blog through 2012 a happy and prosperous holiday season and wish you the best for 2013! Tom Nolle, President CIMI Holiday 2012

I got an email on the Emulex/Endace deal, making among other things the obvious comparison between the move and deals like NetScout/OnPath and Riverbed/Opnet.  I think some of Cisco’s recent deals, as well as moves by VMware/EMC, could also be called “related”.  The problem I have at this point is deciding just what the common…

One of the problems with the whole SDN thing is that it’s so abstract.  We have a combination of a few dedicated researchers who are doing the usual egghead stuff, and a lot of media types picking at the topic.  The good news is that this is coming to an end; we’re getting actual SDN…

NSN is selling its optical transport assets to the same private-equity firm who bought Sycamore’s technology assets, and the move doubles down on a bet that NSN is making—namely that broad product lines aren’t valuable in networking any longer.  I think that at one level that’s true; my research shows that buyers are much less…

Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions group thinks that hybrid clouds will be one of the top trends, and a telling comment is that they see the cloud supplanting the VPN as an enterprise service.  While this may seem outlandish on the surface, I think there’s a lot of logic/truth behind the statement, and it also explains some…