Playing the 5G “can do” versus “will do” game could be enlightening right now. We’re starting to see more about the reality of 5G emergence, and that might help us in the game. The game is important because it will define just how many visible changes we can expect from 5G deployment, and when we…
Anything in network automation is hot these days, so it’s no surprise that the Ciena announcement it was buying DonRiver has made news. Light Reading has a nice story on it. Unlike some other network-vendor M&A that seems to create an independent product area hanging in space, Ciena’s deal seems to target a specific ecosystemic…
Sometimes in business you make big, tough, bets. Sometimes they turn out well, and of course there are those other times. Right now, we have two players in networking making those big bets, one vendor (VMware) and one operator (AT&T). Right now, they’re looking a bit sketchy but still just possibly viable, if they players…
Video and advertising are the most credible drivers for carrier cloud over the next five years, and they may be the most critical even in the long run. They’re also the best hope for early deployment of edge computing. The question is what kind of software and infrastructure video and advertising might end up deploying,…
The cloud has been a kind of cultural influence on the IT space for years, but the influence is now becoming more direct, and the pace of that shift is picking up very quickly. Each of the factors that seem to be driving this shift are important, and in combination they might be transformative. The…
Continuing with my model-and-event-driven service automation theme, some of you wondered whether I could dig a little deeper into how state/event processes were hosted, and also why ExperiaSphere mandated the separation of “orchestration” into a service and resource layer. This also gets into how federation of services across provider boundaries (or across administratively separate parts…
When I did my blog yesterday on the problems with the ETSI ZTA software architecture, I had a number of emails asking how you could do lifecycle management using state/event principles. They showed me that one problem we have in coming to a good consensus on ZTA software is the general lack of understanding on…
In past blogs I’ve talked about abstract threats to the ETSI zero-touch automation (ZTA) project, but referencing one of the open documents, I want to talk here about the real threats that are now visible in the early documentation. ETSI’s reference architecture for ZTA balances the new and old of standards, but I think one…
Virtualization is all about abstraction, and in most cases that means abstracting resources and building resource pools. The ideal vision of “the cloud”, whether it’s a private cloud, a public cloud provider or carrier cloud, is one of a vast pool of resources that can be tapped as needed to provide the optimum in economy…
There was a thoughtful piece on NFV in Light Reading last week, and it raises a lot of points that are becoming important as carrier cloud opportunity awareness grows in the industry. The big point the article makes is one of unrealistic expectations, and surely in our hype-driven tech world, that’s a problem. I do…