Author: Tom Nolle

Google has decided to drop its prices for cloud service and expand its IaaS offerings, apparently to compete better with Amazon or to respond to a cloud market that seems to be racing for the bottom.  Another possibility is simply that there’s a lot of “undifferentiated interest” in the cloud, meaning that buyers don’t know…

I’ve said for months that Cisco needs to be a definitive cloud player and to do that, a software player.  Cisco has now demonstrated it’s serious about being a cloud player with its acquisition of Cloupia, a fairly impressive player in the growing space of provisioning/DevOps, particularly for the cloud.  I think this is a…

Cisco’s earnings calls are almost always an education, and this one may be of particular significance given that the industry (and the global economy) is teetering on the edge of maybe-good, maybe-bad.  Cisco showed some good, and some of Cisco’s lessons are even applicable to other companies in the space.  Some aren’t and shouldn’t offer…

Most everyone who uses telecom these days knows that we’re not in our mothers’ network anymore, but the changes have come somewhat gradually and it’s hard to realize now that we’re only 60 years from the first coast-to-coast non-operator-assist call.  Some recent events may help us come to terms with reality, though. Verizon and AT&T…

The end of a week is a good time to reflect, and there’s nothing better to reflect on than that huge, complex, disorderly transition of global IT and network services that we call “the cloud”.  It’s wonderful to be fuzzy, I guess, because when you are your boundaries can be smeared around at will to…

The Carrier Ethernet Forum isn’t where you’d expect to find things like SDN and Network Functions Virtualization, but there was plenty of both there, and that’s likely an important step for both the group and the two technology initiatives.  SDN and NFV are getting the buzz, enough that groups like CEF think it’s important they…

I’ve blogged a lot over the last couple weeks on the transformation of service provider infrastructure that’s being driven by the economic imperative of monetization and the technical mechanisms of the cloud, SDN, and NFV.  I’ve also noted that this transformation will surely impact network equipment, and that one such impact will be commoditization of…

Alcatel-Lucent reported its quarter, and the results were disappointing to say the least.  The company suffered from margin pressure, caused no doubt by the competition from arch-rival Huawei.  The devil here is in the details, which in some ways are much better for Alcatel-Lucent, and in some ways worse. When you’re a very broad-based supplier…

We’re starting yet another trade show in what’s always been the “trade show season” of the fall; this time it’s 4G World.  The timing may be trite in a calendar sense but it’s fitting in a market sense because we’re certainly on the cusp of some major changes in wireless.  The changes may in fact…

The latest story on Juniper/EMC is that there’s not going to be an acquisition but there will be some dancing, primarily aimed at certifying Juniper’s QFabric as an EMC data center switch.  The move is billed by CRN as a “reference architecture” which would imply a much more significant level of integration, but neither the…