Author: Tom Nolle

There was probably joy in finance-land when Ericsson made their move to acquire Telcordia.  The company, formerly Bell Communications Research or Bellcore, was at the same time the “labs” of the RBOCs and the foundation for the support of and evolution of the classic vision of OSS/BSS.  For years it’s struggled with its conservative roots…

Alcatel-Lucent has finally integrated its video story with a partnership with thePlatform to create a broad, multi-screen and multi-service, streaming video system.  The move is likely in response to the rapid development of video project determination we’ve seen in our surveys of network operators. The “trial marriage” is logical for both parties.  Alcatel-Lucent has a…

We have an interesting counterpoint today in the evolution of technology.  HP’s user conference has been a not-unexpected cloud love-fest, with the company pushing itself as a leading cloud architect and even provider.  And Wall Street is trashing Ciena because they’re not holding onto revenue and profit growth.  At one level, this stuff seems pretty…

Well, Apple had its WWDC and Steve Jobs was there, and for the Apple aficionados it was pure love.  For those less indoctrinated, it was a bit of a yawn.  The iCloud does offer some new things, the most notable of which is an optional system to match on-system music to the cloud’s (better-quality) copy…

Groupon filed with the SEC for an IPO, a move that suggests the company wants to quickly execute on the potential social-networking Wall Street Love Wave that LinkedIn showed us.  There’s always a question of whether the bullish view on social will sustain itself, though.  One might even argue that Groupon thinks it won’t, and…

VMware is buying enterprise social/collaboration player Socialcast, and the move is demonstrating a lot of interesting things about the future—of collaboration, virtualization, and of course VMware.  We may be on the cusp of some interesting changes. “Collaboration” is the term we apply to communication between workers aimed at reaching some collective decision or combined work…

Cisco is said to be announcing a new white-label managed service offering that’s designed to be resold by network operators (presumably Cisco customers) to rebrand for the SMB space.  Cisco would provide the actual remote management resources.  The move is yet another interesting slant on how Cisco thinks it can help operators, make more money…

TMF’s Management World conference continues to show itself as a kind of cross-section of market and technology issues for the NGN.  This particular body, unlike most standards bodies, has long been almost a business, a marketing powerhouse that’s jealously guarded and effectively promoted its prerogatives.  The question is whether it can now overcome some of…

Verizon has taken yet another “leadership” step in defining how operators see their revenue futures.  The company has indicated it would be likely acquiring small software companies to create SaaS offerings hosted on the Verizon cloud.  I don’t think that the significance of this move is being appreciated, and so I want to open this…

The optical networking conference this week is opening some interesting issues about the future of “the core”, and probably even more interesting issues regarding networking overall.  While the focus of media coverage has been 100G Ethernet, the real question is how networks are valued, or made valuable. We might call the current situation in the…