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…
Is the road to success in the cloud horizontal or vertical? I’m not talking about actual roads, of course, but rather about whether pursuit of public cloud revenue should be directed at generally useful technologies (horizontal) or specialized and focused applications (vertical). One of these approaches has dominated over time, but the other is seeing…
We’re happy (and relieved!) to tell you that the tutorial on SD-WAN technology we’ve promised is now available HERE as a zip file that contains the PDF. There’s a license agreement on the cover page that describes the requirements for sharing this document, and I’ll expand on them again here. Note that this PDF is…
Nokia’s quarterly numbers were, to say the least, disappointing, and while telecom equipment is generally a challenge these days (Juniper had its own problem with its quarterly results), Nokia seems to be more challenged than most. The reasons that’s the should be an indicator for others in the telecom equipment space, and also perhaps for…
With what seems to be an explosion of content provider acquisitions underway, Verizon remains committed to being a content delivery partner not a content competitor. With streaming video seeming to be everyone’s direction, Verizon still doesn’t have its own streaming offering. What makes Verizon think they can buck these trends when competitor AT&T has gone…
TV viewers and network professionals alike love the idea of faceoffs. What would happen if a hippo fought an alligator, a lion fought a leopard? Hot stuff. On the network side, we’ve already had “Who wins, Ethernet or IP (or maybe ATM)?” and now perhaps we’re looking at the ultimate tech faceoff, which is “Open-Source…
One of the questions raised by the onrush of interest in SD-WAN is where SDN is. Obviously, two things whose acronyms start with “software-defined” should be related in some way, and I’ve noted in other blogs that SD-WAN and SDN may converge in the longer term. What are the differences today, and where are we…
You might wonder why, if logical networking is such a great idea as I’ve suggested it is, SD-WAN vendors haven’t been flocking to it. They still aren’t, but there’s at least movement in that direction. Cato Networks has announced an “identity-aware routing” feature for its SD-WAN product, and I think it demonstrates that logical networking…