Author: Tom Nolle

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…

Juniper’s MX has been one of its most successful products, and it’s not surprising that the company wants to build on that success.  On Tuesday they announced a series of enhancements to the MX “Universal Edge”, all designed to host service intelligence close to the network edge.  That’s a worthy goal, and in my view…

Despite all of the recent interest in cloud computing, the darling of network operator monetization in dollar terms is still content.  In addition, content represents the largest risk to the operators, particularly to the cable MSOs who provide more than half the Internet service in the US.  OTT video is both a target of opportunity…

Red Hat announced its numbers, and as one Street report said, “the streak is broken”.  The company was light on revenue and net income, considerably below both the average of its performance over time and its prior year.  The result was that the Street has bumped them after hours, but the Street’s judgment may in…

Oracle is one of the most interesting companies in the industry, I think.  Not only is it a tech giant and bellwether for the space overall, it’s innovative and it’s got one foot on each side of quite a few of the critical industry divides; cloud versus data center, open-source versus proprietary, software versus hardware. …