Truth sometimes hits you in the face. So it is with NFV savings. A Light Reading story quotes Goran Car of Croatia’s Hrvatski Telekom as saying that every function they virtualize has to reduce TCO by 40%. This is particularly interesting, given that most of the ten operators who created the “Call for Action” paper…
The Changing World of Operator-Provided SD-WAN
The excitement about SD-WAN as an operator offering doesn’t surprise me. My own research showed that for all of this year, the operator sales channel for SD-WAN was the fastest growing. My modeling shows that it’s very likely to make up two-thirds of all SD-WAN sales by the end of next year. But despite this…
An Organized Look at OSS/BSS Transformation
Light Reading did a nice piece on OSS/BSS in the cloud, which happens to be the next of my “what operators think” topics, arising from my almost-two-months of exchanges with a variety of operators globally. The LR article covers some things I didn’t get into, and I got into more detail with operators on some…
Injecting Some Reality at the Edge
Because we just came off an edge computing conference, we’ve got a lot of edge computing stories this week. A big part of this is the usual tech hype cycle, of course. When you have ad sponsorship, the site owners have an incentive to create links that are clicked often and so serve ads often. …
Some Operator Views on NFV versus Cloud-Native
Do operators think cloud-native is better than NFV? Do they think NFV could be done in a cloud-native way? What do they think they’ll end up deploying most? These are questions I tried to get answered in my recent exchanges with network operators. I was a bit less successful than I’d hoped, but I think…
Principles for the Creation of Optimum Virtual Networks
What exactly are the attributes of a good virtual network? This is perhaps the most critical question in our industry, because virtual networking is a foundation for not only operator service initiatives like NFV, but also the foundation of cloud-native applications. You’d think, given this, that we would have nailed down the characteristics of virtual…
Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud-Native Applications?
One of the interesting questions raised during my recent enterprise Q&A related to the adoption of cloud-native technology for traditional business applications. An enterprise who’d gone unusually far in assessing cloud-native, to the point of starting a small application test, had developers suspend writing code to answer a basic question about architecture. “How does this…
Cloud-Native Ecosystems Morph to Cloud-Native Products
What we need is cloud for the masses. We’ve failed to realize almost all the heady projections about cloud computing, not because cloud computing couldn’t have met them, but because we couldn’t meet cloud computing on a reasonable footing. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. The most profound thing going on in the cloud today isn’t…
What Issues Shape Operators’ Tech Plans for 2020?
Technology planning, for operators, is the traditional start of their budget cycle. While budgets are usually calendar-year, technology planning typically starts in the second half of September and runs through mid-November. The priorities for each of these planning seasons sets the tone for spending not only in the coming budget cycle, but for several cycles…
Taking a Mission-Focused Look at AI
I blogged last week on the reality of edge computing, and I think that it’s time to take a mission-focused look AI too. We tend, in all of tech, to focus entirely on a new technology rather than asking just what the technology will accomplish. As a result, tech promises turn into hype more than…
