One of the many concepts the cloud has brought us is the “single source of truth”, the idea behind the repository-centric operations vision called “GitOps”. Some vendors, like Ciena, have recently been promoting a transformation model based on collecting data from operations systems and management systems into a repository. This raises the question of whether…
I want to take up federation again, extending the federation approach of Google’s Anthos to the service provider space, where federation is surely needed. I’ve said many times that the cloud initiatives we’re seeing are addressing many of the things that operator standards for advanced services and hosted features should have addressed. The question now…
Google has been in a fight for third place in public cloud, and a distant third at that. For some time, many (myself included) have wondered how Google would gain market share, beating IBM for third and even closing in on the leaders. Now we may see the first clear signals of their overall strategy….
Computing is being revolutionized by the cloud, whether it’s actually in the cloud or in the data center. In fact, the line between the two is blurring in a number of novel ways that might give us some insight into how applications, data centers, and IT will look in five or ten years. Not surprisingly,…
Services based on physical connectivity, like IP services today, seem to be hitting a profit wall. As I’ve pointed out in other blogs, we’re seeing operators under pressure to cut costs because customer willingness to pay for more bandwidth isn’t particularly high. There are surveys that suggest that plenty of users would like 100Mbps, or…
There is a tide, they say, and that’s true for many things, technology included. It’s been almost five years since I first said that there was more to be gained from operations automation than by capex reduction via things like NFV. That was true then, and still true even just a couple years ago. It’s…
Recently, my blogs on carrier cloud have focused on the question of whether a trend among operators toward outsourcing public cloud services to a cloud provider will impact carrier cloud. A related question, raised in this Light Reading piece, is whether it could also impact edge computing. An element of that question is whether edge…
Telefonica has joined Vodafone in picking a cloud partner for enterprise services, rather than fielding its own carrier cloud. Neither Telefonica nor Vodafone picked the top provider—Amazon—and neither picked runner-up and hybrid cloud leader Microsoft either. Telefonica selected Google and Vodafone selected IBM. What does all this mean for operators, for carrier cloud, and for…
With the media asking whether it would really be so bad for operators if 5G were slipped, and whether perhaps the whole idea of accelerating 5G was worthwhile, Cisco is telling the world they’re the most important 5G vendor because they can help operators monetize 5G. I think all these stories are connected, and that…
We now have a pretty good idea what SD-WAN looks like, at least in its basic form. We can infer, from things like the MEF draft SD-WAN standard, what some SD-WAN future developments might be. What we really need to do is explore the future of SD-WAN in a more formalized way. SD-WAN, as I’ve…