We all know that in a market that’s commoditizing as networking seems to be, it’s common to see “horizontal aggregation” of players, where competitors bulk up to improve efficiency as market profit margins decline. We now seem to be entering an era of “vertical aggregation”, where companies buy not competitors but rather symbiotic players in…
Everyone has surely heard about Google’s massive outage, even those who weren’t directly impacted by it. The fact that “network congestion” could take down such a broad set of services—some essential to their users—is troubling, and it should be. The details of the cause will probably eventually come out, but it appears the issues were…
5G is surely a popular topic for media and bloggers, in no small part because it’s seen as the salvation of both service providers and the vendors who sell to them. A recent article in Fierce Telecom raises some good points on just who might benefit from 5G, points that deserve a close examination based…
There are a lot of moving parts to cloud-native, some of which (like state control) I’ve already blogged on, and some of which have received considerable attention in the media overall. If you look at the big picture, you find the strategies for achieving cloud-native behavior fall into two groups. One is the software design…
One of the big and hidden problems with cloud-native and microservices is state. True cloud-native elements should be fully scalable and resilient, and that combination mandates that these elements save nothing within themselves, even the context of a dialog with a user. “State” or “context” is intrinsic to virtually all business applications, including applications designed…
Cisco gave us classic good/bad news in its earnings call. The good was that their guidance for the rest of the year was strong. The bad news was that service provider revenues were down by 13%, and these points were summed up by Light Reading and CNBC . There are a lot of implications to…
I ‘ve mentioned NGOSS Contract many times in prior blogs, and I was somewhat surprised when my latest blog (yesterday) raised questions from readers who were actually TMF members. One was particularly interesting: “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?” The actual question was a big more complicated and interesting, and that was how…
Light Reading sets a lot of the dialog in the industry, and so when they raise a topic it’s important to me, to my clients, and to those who read my blog. An example is this article, citing a discussion at the TMF’s Digital Transformation World event in Nice. The piece recounts operator frustration with…
I mentioned in my Monday blog my mock political debate on “smart versus dumb pipes.” Now it seems that the industry is heading for a reprise of that same issue, which is a good thing because it was never really resolved. The obvious question is whether there are new ideas behind the old question, or…
Standards are not getting great press these days, nor are standards groups. Part of the problem is that open-source seems to be stealing the traditional thunder of standards, and part the fact that standards seem to take forever. That combination can be deadly, and when you think of standards in connection with a hot and…