Author: Tom Nolle

Adtran is going to buy NSN’s wireline broadband business, a move that I think shows a lot about the space overall.  Obviously you don’t make a compelling offer to sell a business that’s got nowhere to go but up, and even outside the US wireline broadband is in trouble.  I wonder if Adtran isn’t admitting…

We at CIMI Corporation want to wish you a very Happy Holiday and a prosperous and safe New Year.  Please accept this card as our holiday greeting to you all! Tom Nolle

I’ve talked about the profit problems of network operators for years now, simply because they’ve talked to me about those problems for years.  In rough terms, revenue per bit has declined by 50% per year for five and a half years running, and this decline means that profits on infrastructure have dropped sharply even though…

It’s a kind of day of change in technology, particularly if you believe some of the speculation that’s floating around.  Certainly 2011 has been a challenging year for vendors, and it may be that the challenges will be only more formidable in 2012.  Given that, it wouldn’t be surprising if we saw some dramatic market…

Business changes in networking are often more significant than technical changes even though networking is ostensibly a tech market area, and that’s the case this AM in my view.  NSN has announced a major refocusing/restructuring that will cut about 17,000 jobs worldwide and concentrate company efforts on mobile broadband.  Obviously this is a big deal…

HP reported its quarter, and while the company’s revenue-line beat of estimates buoyed its stock after hours, we think that the results were at least as troubling as they were gratifying for HP, or at least they should have been. Whitman’s decision not to spin out the PC business was a major risk factor for…

The Street is busy handicapping the networking space, and what they’re finding is interesting in part because it demonstrates that stock potential and company sales and influence aren’t always congruent.  Sometimes they are, though. One recent Street favorite is Cisco, whose sudden fall from financial grace shook both investors and company management.  The result was…

Amazon’s quarter disappointed almost everyone, and the fact that there were so many different views about just what was disappointing makes it all the more challenging to analyze.  Many said the profit picture was the problem; Amazon’s margins have been thin historically and the Street wanted proof that they’d fatten up.  They didn’t get it. …

UBS reports that there are some unusual shifts in telecom spending, and I agree if one defines “unusual” as being “atypical to past performance” rather than “without clear cause”.  What they’re seeing is a lower-than-usual ramp in capex in the fourth quarter, and a larger shift toward wireless investment.  Duh!  We have a lower ramp…

Our second day of “Big Earnings” week has brought some more interesting developments, from which I hope to draw some interesting conclusions.  We have ups and downs, as usual, and that’s pretty much what I had expected to see this quarter.  The “secular” or broad market trends are really not driving the bus here; it’s…