Author: Tom Nolle

If there’s any point about AI that’s critical, not just important, it’s whether the “real” AI applications evolve and take hold before the hype wears off. If there’s a single company we’d need to watch to answer this, it’s IBM, and they reported earnings last week. IBM has, from the first, represented the AI viewpoint…

As I’ve said a number of times recently, enterprises are still in the throes of learning how to deploy their own AI. The process is complicated because of shifts in the AI model technology (smaller, less demanding models), the ways AI can be trained (foundation models or “bare” models), the framework for use (hosted, hybrid,…

I think that the HPE acquisition of Juniper is the most significant company-side event in the network equipment market, and I think it’s critical for both HPE and Juniper. But execution is critical, and last week, HPE offered the first projections of a year’s worth of the combination. The Street didn’t like it. I asked…

Let’s face it, when there’s an uncertainty in a market, companies get antsy because investors do. When the uncertainty is doubled because the sellers and buyers both have issues, they get real antsy. So it is with telecom, and a Light Reading article on Ericsson is a good indicator. The basic problem with telco equipment…

We still can’t really pin down the value of AI overall, so it’s hardly a surprise that telcos can’t pin it down either. What’s a bit surprising to me is that a lot of the talk about AI savings ignores the fact that AI is a technology that can be applied to enhance automation, and…

Earnings reports are always important, both to assess a company’s position and to validate (or invalidate) the market assumptions they’re making in their product planning and positioning. This quarter, the third calendar quarter of 2025, will be particularly important because of the massive bets tech companies have placed on AI. Obviously, companies like Google and…

Shakespeare said “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” No offense to the Bard intended, but the problem with the tide/opportunity analogy is that tides happen more than once. You…

In a lot of ways, the IT we have today is derived from, and little different from, what we had in the 1960s. We still think of applications, input-process-output, and reports and documents generated by applications as the way to integrate IT with business processes. Why do we do this? Because we’ve not really thought…

A recent piece in SDxCentral talking about the data issues associated with network operator automation projects was interesting to me as yet another example of the parallels between enterprises and operators. Enterprises looking at the use of AI in operations have made the very same point to me; the issue is far less one of…

Sometimes the past can teach us the future. Is AI one of those times? Perhaps, so I want to take a new look at some past data to try to find out. Those of you who follow my blog know that I’ve often talked about the past three cycles of enterprise investment in information technology….