VMware has been in the news this week, both for its plans to make its Virtual Cloud Network “real” and for the acquisition of the Dell EMC Service Assurance Suite’s technology group. The two moves, as I’ve noted in an earlier blog, seem directed primarily at the network operator, managed service provider, and cloud provider…
Maybe you believe in edge computing, or in IoT or AI, or maybe carrier cloud, or all of the above. The main thing is you believe the future requirements for applications and hosting will be different, and so the data centers and servers of the future will be different. The obvious question is what these…
I blogged quite a while ago about “intent-washing”, the tendency to use the terms of intent models and modeling where that’s not really the story being told. Like all “washing”, intent-washing is driven by a desire to ride a positive news wave even when you’re not really doing exactly what the term means. Cisco is…
Cisco always signals important market moves, sometimes with tangible changes and sometimes just by erecting an attractive billboard aimed at the media. The one they announced last week, the integration of the Viptela SD-WAN software with Cisco routers, is surely in the first category. Still, does this signal a problem for vendors in the space,…
As a former software engineer, architect, and head of some high-tech programming groups, I love APIs. I also have to admit that APIs are getting to be a lot more complicated than they used to be, and things like edge computing, event processing, and microservices are promising to make them even more complex over time. …
I want to continue my comments on managed services with some insights from the service buyers. I’ve been watching the buyer side of the space for about five years now, in part to see what might be required of NFV in support of managed service deployments. Since then, I’ve kept in touch with some of…
Sometimes you just seem to have the wrong people. Not bad, not incompetent, but just not right for the times or their role. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve had IBM release another lackluster quarter, and GE rumored to be selling its GE Digital division, once seen as the point of light in the…
We are definitely hearing more about managed services these days. I’ve talked about some technology developments linked to managed services (notably SD-WAN) but I’ve been going through user surveys and comments to decode the driving forces. Since those forces will shape the market far more than technology will, I want to spend some time on…
I’m a big fan of things like open source, Kubernetes, and now the Istio project that many have described as focusing on extend Kubernetes. It’s hard for non-programmers to digest software architectures, and certainly nobody involved with Istio has made it any easier, but I think the portrail of Istio as a Kubernetes extension project…
It is becoming clear that business networking is undergoing a transformation. Like all “transformations” it’s built on a combination of revolutionary but still emerging technologies, and problems that have been growing for decades. The mixture of these things creates unpredictable combinations, and results, so we can’t yet say for sure where we’re going to end…