If most Internet traffic is content, should we make content accommodations in the protocols used? As someone recently noted in a LinkedIn comment on a previous blog of mine, PARC has promoted a concept called “Content-Centric Networking” or CCN to do just that. The idea got a lot of attention four or five years ago,…
In a blog last week, I criticized the NFV concept of the VIM. A “virtual infrastructure manager”, I noted, should be an abstraction of the infrastructure, not a gateway to a presumed implementation. The fact that some operators are attempting to create a set of standard “NFVi” or NFV Infrastructure models is proof; a good…
The onrushing quarterly earnings reports cycle continues to generate insights into market and competitive conditions. Last week, Amazon blew away Wall Street expectations, Microsoft guided higher on its cloud revenues, and IBM ditched their CEO. All these developments have their own implications, but there are also some broader market trends being exposed, and I want…
The story that Big Switch is being acquired by Arista is just a story…for now. The story that there’s been a lot of M&A dialog around the company is pretty clearly true, and it may well be that it’s the interest overall that makes this important, not who ends up doing the deal. Big Switch…
Juniper reported their quarter on Monday, and their numbers and commentary always offer an interesting perspective on the networking market. This, even though you have to dig quite a bit to get past the traditional upbeat tone the company takes, no matter what’s happening. On the surface, the results were mixed. Revenue beat by a…
Light Reading did an interesting article asking for “a little less conversation, a little more action” on cloud-native VNFs. I agree with a lot of what the piece says, particularly about the fact that the market and technology aren’t really ready for cloud-native VNFs, and that the Linux Foundation is eager to try to close…
Is gaming a driver for networking? I’ve been seeing articles that link multiplayer online gaming with edge computing, gigabit Internet service, augmented reality, and a bunch of other things that people are really interested in. The question is whether the interest would be enough to actually drive incremental networking opportunity, and from that drive infrastructure…
What happens if the food chain breaks? Anyone who’s studied biology knows that life is a complex ecosystem arranged in a kind of pyramid, where the stuff at the bottom is eaten by the next layer up, and so forth. Disruptions in the food chain lead to imbalances in the ecosystem; look at the relationship…
Perhaps the most important rivalry in IT is the one between Red Hat and VMware. If the future is the hybrid cloud (which it is), and if realization of that future involves the creation of a unified hybrid-cloud platform for development and deployment (which it does), then these are the players who could provide it. …
Having commented negatively on research reports in my last blog, I want to try to overcome their specific issues and summarize, based on real data, the likely market trends for 2020. Wall Street and (to a lesser and less timely way) government research provides some numbers I can push through my model to see if…