Author: Tom Nolle

Guess what?  Optical companies are hot again.  Ciena reported better-than-expected earnings, Alcatel-Lucent says that people are pushing it for delivery of its new 400G stuff…it seems like the days of fiber transport slumps are gone.  They may be, and for two kind-of-orthogonal reasons. If you think about the comments I got from EU network operators,…

Cisco reported their results for the quarter, and while the current numbers were good (beating estimates and up year over year) the guidance was tepid.  As a result, Cisco’s stock took a major hit post-market that is off its lows this morning but still down about 7%.  Network equipment competitors also fell, and this is…

Not surprisingly, Interop looks like it’s going to be all about the cloud.  Not surprisingly, a lot of the noise is nothing more than that, but there are some things emerging that might be indicators of real market shifts.  While the cloud is the focus, I don’t expect there to be much in the way…

People seem to be catching on to the fact that SDNs are going to have an impact, but I think there is still a tendency to underestimate what that might be.  The Google announcement on their use of OpenFlow has prompted Light Reading to ask (rightfully) whether the fact that companies like Google are becoming…

The early indications suggest that RIM’s vision for its new OS and device line may fall short of revolution, and if that’s the case the company’s chances of recovery are slim.  The demonstrations of Blackberry 10 suggest that while they’ve changed the GUI and keyboard, there’s little or nothing new in the cloud-to-device relationship.  I’m…

Top news today is the announcement that Microsoft will invest in a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary for the Nook and ebooks.  This is a strange one, I think, for the obvious reason that the Nook is an Android device, and the only concession that’s obvious for Microsoft is one for a reader for Windows…

Alcatel-Lucent reported their first quarter yesterday, and there was a lot of red ink in play.  The company’s equipment revenues fell below a critical threshold for the first time in years.  Particularly troubling was the fact that wireless lost almost 30% y/y and almost 12% q/q.  The only semi-bright spot was IP routing, that lost…

The latest casualty of the earnings season is Netflix, whose numbers actually beat the Street’s estimates but who offered subscriber data and guidance that scared the stream-touched among the investment community.  There should have been no surprise here and the fact that the stock got punished for the expected means that people still refuse to…

Microsoft reported its earnings, and other than some weakness in entertainment, the numbers beat the estimates.  The PC-software giant showed strength in business sales overall (where market growth was more than double the consumer space) and of course its Windows franchise still works (though not as well as before) even in the consumer laptop space. …

We had a number of interesting earnings reports today, so let’s get to it! Nokia’s numbers for the last quarter were awful, with smartphone sales falling sharply.  You can’t blame that completely on the Windows Phone decision, but it darn sure didn’t help and it’s not going to help them in 2012 either.  The question…