Author: Tom Nolle

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…

The earnings reports from F5 and EMC make it clear that tech in general, and networking in particular, and enterprise most particularly, has serious challenges to face.  The largest one, I think, is that people have gotten used to the idea that networking was somewhat immune from macro conditions; clearly it isn’t.  But macro conditions…

It seems the SDN scene just never goes to sleep.  Today at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress a group of Tier One operators announced they were launching an ambitious initiative called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to standardize network infrastructure and virtualize network functions/services.  As I’m hearing, this activity goes beyond OpenFlow and SDN to…

Anyone who thought PCs were healthy has probably had that knocked out of them by now.  Microsoft and AMD have added their voices to the chorus of “below seasonality” qualifiers as the companies reported lower numbers than expected.  AMD is clearly in trouble, with significant layoffs now on tap.  Google’s numbers, released by surprise in…

What would happen if the two largest network equipment vendors and some of the biggest carriers in the world stood up in public and said that there was a major threat to the whole future of broadband, a threat that could undermine everything we believed would happen to improve our mobile lives?  What would happen…