One of the fundamental principles of NFV, deeply engrained but little recognized, is that NFV is about replacing devices with virtual devices. This was done largely to fit NFV into the scope of prevailing network and service management practices, which of course limits the impact that NFV would have on broader operations and management systems. …
The old Ben Franklin quote about the difficulties in getting 13 clocks to chime at the same time wasn’t just about colonial politics. Synchronizing autonomous systems to behave cooperatively has been a networking challenge for decades. For a variety of reasons, including business practices, technology, and regulations, networks have been divided into separate “administrations”, and…
Live TV was for years the Golden Goose of wireline services, but we all know what happened to the Golden Goose of fable. The same thing may be happening to live TV according to a Light Reading piece. I don’t agree with everything in the article, but I do agree that the forces of the…
Oracle didn’t offer great guidance in its earnings report, but it didn’t have a bad quarter. The best thing about it was its as-a-service business. That raises the question of whether SaaS is a new channel for cloud service success. It also raises the question of whether, as an AT&T executive suggested, there’s fragmentation in…
IBM and Vodafone want to partner in the future of enterprise cloud, as the deal announced at MWC shows. Given how much enterprise hybrid cloud is a focus for cloud providers, and given IBM’s need to catch up, it’s not a surprise. Vodafone would also gain if a new enterprise vision for cloud applications promoted…
One of the most potentially dramatic developments in networking is an acquisition. We’ve just had two of them; the acquisition of NGINX by F5 and the acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia. Will either or both of these deals have an impact on the industry, do they signal an impact already being felt, or are they…
There are a lot of ways to transform networks, but the most fundamental way would clearly be to build them differently, meaning not only different vendors but different network architectures. We’ve kicked around a bunch of suggested new approaches but none of them have really gained traction. The best proof of that is that Cisco…
Facebook has announced a “privacy-focused” vision for its future, a response to what can only be called an avalanche of privacy, fake news, and abusive posts problems. Some people have responded to these issues by dropping out of Facebook, but it’s less likely that has stimulated Facebook to act than that they fear government regulation,…
ETSI is now looking at how network features, specifically virtual network functions (VNFs) could be updated without disrupting the services they’re used in. In the cloud and application development, this has been a requirement for some time, and it fits into something called “continuous integration/continuous development” or CI/CD. The idea is to allow changes to…
Evolutions are comfortable and revolutions less so, but it’s pretty obvious that in many ways we’re facing a revolution in networking. And yes, network technologies are among the things that are changing radically, but the foundation of the revolution is fundamental changes in the role of connectivity. Those changes are impacting both the consumer market…