VMware turned in a good quarter, no question. There is a question on why that’s true. According to a piece in CRN, it’s their multi-cloud strategy, but I’m not convinced. Multi-cloud is a requirement for many enterprises, but is it enough to pull through a whole virtualization story? Not according to the enterprises I’ve talked…
Another MWC has come and gone, replete with the usual spectacular hype and theater. At the end of the day, what did we get out of it? One good way to answer that is to explore what the financial industry thought. While they’re no less biased in their views, the fact that they’re biased in…
Light Reading did a thoughtful piece on NFVi yesterday, and it highlights a number of points we should be thinking about when we talk about “NFV”, “cloud-native”, and “transformation”. Some of the points show we’re at least thinking in the right direction, but others show we still have a long way to go. NFVi stands…
Where do you go when you’re tired of orchestration? Cloudify says it’s “micro-orchestration”, according to their latest release of the Spire edge-orchestration platform. Given that Spire is targeted at edge computing, and given that operators are obviously looking at the edge and considering how they’d monetize it, I think it’s clear that edge computing is…
What should network operators be focusing on today? I know you think I’m going to say “5G” but I’m not, at least not in any emphatic or traditional sense. The question isn’t what network evolutions are going to be, after all. If you’re going to do wireless in five years, you’re going to do 5G…
What are the risks of a network-device exploit? The flap about Huawei has raised the question of a deliberate, even state-sponsored, built-in vulnerability, but of course network devices have the potential for a hack/exploit created by a failure in testing and quality control. Cisco recently had to patch one in an SD-WAN product. We hear…
ATT has been a leader in what we could call transformation, and we recently had a number of stories about its adoption of Airship, via a deal with Mirantis. This follows on an AT&T blog on the topic last May. There are a lot of things about this deal to like, but there’s not been…
“White boxes in the network” sounds like a bit like “Red Sails in the Sunset” (at least to my generation), but it’s not just about a nice appearance. White-box switching and routing are critical for network operators, and increasingly so for enterprises. I blogged about some initiatives in the space last week, and today I…
Everyone accepts that network operators would love to eliminate proprietary network devices. NFV was aimed at eliminating at least some of them, but using a cloud to host a data-plane function has its issues. AT&T recognized this and decided to frame an open (later released as open-source) operating system to run in an appliance and…
One of the things I learned in the past was that “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions were worlds apart. Another thing I learned was that “pent-up demand” reflects in how realization of opportunity bunches up until released. It’s pretty clear that 5G supporters haven’t learned that lesson, as an article in Light Reading reflects. A “necessary”…