Want to know the biggest technical problem in networking today? It’s the fact that we can’t seem to stop thinking “interfaces” when we need to be thinking “APIs”. Every day we see examples of this, and every day the industry seems to ignore the significance. We need to face it now, if we’re going to…
There were a lot of articles yesterday in Light Reading on various aspects of the telco cloud, perhaps leading up to a theme for their coming event. We had the “strategic imperative” piece, some more technical pieces, and the view that the cloud was essential for hosting NFV. Operators are in fact “wanting what they’ve…
Is zero-touch automation synchronized swimming or just playing in the pool? That’s a perhaps-less-than-elegant way of asking whether ZTA requires a unified orchestration model, or can be achieved while retaining the separation of network and service management. This is important because we don’t have unified standards or unified telco management across those two spaces, and…
The Netflix results suggest that OTT video is a big factor in broadband’s future. If that’s true, then what does it mean for the industry as a whole? Linear TV was at one point the credible profit engine for wireline broadband. What happens to that sector if the engine breaks down? What happens to vendors? …
We’ve had the SDN buzz and the NFV buzz and now we seem to be getting the automation buzz. It’s not quite hype yet, because everyone is trying to come to terms with just what “automation” is, but we’re surely headed there. Will it become reality? That depends on the benefits it can produce. I…
In my last blog, I mentioned that we might be on the verge of “application networking”. Some of my readers who know me sent emails asking if I could define exactly what I mean by that. I can do that, but perhaps better still I can offer the definition that enterprises have evolved during the…
There were a couple of interesting pieces in the trade news yesterday, and the combination of the two may be more interesting yet. One piece was from SDxCentral, commenting on the reported difficulties associated with container deployments, and the other piece from Light Reading on the addition of zero-touch provisioning to SD-WAN. Combined, these articles…
Are we finally realizing that NFV is going to fail without change? I’ve been saying that for years, but an article in Light Reading last week suggested that operators in a conference were increasingly skeptical about both SDN and NFV. Skepticism about the present is at least a credible driver to changes in the future. …
What does an event-driven app look like? That might seem to be a silly question, but as we move toward at least some level of realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) and as serverless cloud computing services aimed at event processing proliferate, it’s a question we need to answer. Most developers, consultants, analysts, and…
For decades, enterprises have told me that the data center drives the network. The vendors they said had the greatest influence on their overall network strategic planning were those who had the greatest strategic influence in the data center. For the last ten years, the data center has been evolving to meet the requirements of…