Author: Tom Nolle

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…

In the ever-evolving world of SDN Cisco, the network market-leader is…well…evolving.  The latest story from the OpenStack event is that Cisco is in fact going to embrace OpenFlow and more mainstream industry principles, but my interpretation is that it’s also going to try to out-climb OpenFlow, to rise to the top of the stack to…

Here’s a graphic representation of an axiom from aviation that I feel is all-too-often ignored in positioning technology products today:  There are risks in flying too high, but flying under the radar has risks of its own!

One of my recurrent rants has been that the IMS proponents in the market (largely those Big Four network equipment vendors with mobile RAN and related components in their portfolios) needed to somehow make IMS a part of web development for mobile devices rather than an alternative to it.  Happily, that’s exactly what Alcatel-Lucent said…

Huawei is the company that a lot of people love to hate.  They’re a China equipment giant who’s always been suspected of having close ties to the government there.  In the past they’ve been sued for various intellectual property infringements (and settled).  The country itself has been linked to attacks on government websites, and so…

And it just gets better, SDN-wise, I say with considerable irony.  Cisco did a virtual-data-center network deal yesterday (vCider) and of course everyone is out there saying that it’s going to help Cisco with its SDN approach, perhaps to be integrated in Cisco switches!  Even for a market that’s been more nonsense than substance, this…

Well, it seems like the SDN action never ends.  We have two stories today; the SDN strategy that sort-of-was, and the SDN strategy that probably isn’t. Let’s start with the “isn’t’.  Cisco announced some optical enhancements to its CRS line, and what’s interesting about them is that they are aimed at an area where SDN…