One of the most potentially dramatic developments in networking is an acquisition. We’ve just had two of them; the acquisition of NGINX by F5 and the acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia. Will either or both of these deals have an impact on the industry, do they signal an impact already being felt, or are they…
There are a lot of ways to transform networks, but the most fundamental way would clearly be to build them differently, meaning not only different vendors but different network architectures. We’ve kicked around a bunch of suggested new approaches but none of them have really gained traction. The best proof of that is that Cisco…
Facebook has announced a “privacy-focused” vision for its future, a response to what can only be called an avalanche of privacy, fake news, and abusive posts problems. Some people have responded to these issues by dropping out of Facebook, but it’s less likely that has stimulated Facebook to act than that they fear government regulation,…
ETSI is now looking at how network features, specifically virtual network functions (VNFs) could be updated without disrupting the services they’re used in. In the cloud and application development, this has been a requirement for some time, and it fits into something called “continuous integration/continuous development” or CI/CD. The idea is to allow changes to…
Evolutions are comfortable and revolutions less so, but it’s pretty obvious that in many ways we’re facing a revolution in networking. And yes, network technologies are among the things that are changing radically, but the foundation of the revolution is fundamental changes in the role of connectivity. Those changes are impacting both the consumer market…
VMware turned in a good quarter, no question. There is a question on why that’s true. According to a piece in CRN, it’s their multi-cloud strategy, but I’m not convinced. Multi-cloud is a requirement for many enterprises, but is it enough to pull through a whole virtualization story? Not according to the enterprises I’ve talked…
Another MWC has come and gone, replete with the usual spectacular hype and theater. At the end of the day, what did we get out of it? One good way to answer that is to explore what the financial industry thought. While they’re no less biased in their views, the fact that they’re biased in…
Light Reading did a thoughtful piece on NFVi yesterday, and it highlights a number of points we should be thinking about when we talk about “NFV”, “cloud-native”, and “transformation”. Some of the points show we’re at least thinking in the right direction, but others show we still have a long way to go. NFVi stands…
Where do you go when you’re tired of orchestration? Cloudify says it’s “micro-orchestration”, according to their latest release of the Spire edge-orchestration platform. Given that Spire is targeted at edge computing, and given that operators are obviously looking at the edge and considering how they’d monetize it, I think it’s clear that edge computing is…
What should network operators be focusing on today? I know you think I’m going to say “5G” but I’m not, at least not in any emphatic or traditional sense. The question isn’t what network evolutions are going to be, after all. If you’re going to do wireless in five years, you’re going to do 5G…