I asked in an earlier blog whether the elephant of service automation was too big to grope. The Light Reading 2020 conference this week raised a different slant on that old parable, which is whether you can build an elephant from the parts you’ve perceived by touching them. Wikipedia cites the original story of the…
It looks like our next overhyped concept will be AI. To the “everything old is new again” crowd, this will be gratifying. I worked on robotics concepts way back in the late 1970s, and also on a distributed-system speech recognition application that used AI principles. Wikipedia says the idea was introduced in 1956, and there…
When I blogged about the ONAP Amsterdam release, I pointed out that the documentation that was available on ONAP didn’t address the questions I had about its architecture and capabilities. The ONAP people contacted me and offered to have a call to explain things, and also provided links and documentation. As I said in my…
Everyone has probably heard the old joke about a person reaching behind a curtain and trying to identify an elephant by touching various parts. The moral is that sometimes part-identification gets in the way of recognizing the whole. That raises what I think is an interesting question for our industry in achieving the transformation goals…
I noted in my blog yesterday that I was surprised and disappointed by the fact that the network operators didn’t seem to have given much thought to carrier cloud in their fall technology planning cycle. I had a decent number of emails from operators, including some that I’d surveyed, to explain why that seemed to…
We are now past the traditional fall technology planning cycle for the network operators, and I’ve heard from the ones that cooperate in providing me insight into what they expect to do next year and beyond. There are obviously similarities between their final plans and their preliminary thinking, but they’ve also evolved their positions and…
The ONAP Amsterdam release is out, and while there are reports that the modular structure eases some of the criticisms made of ONAP, I can’t say that it’s done anything to address my own concerns about the basic architecture. I’ve tried to answer them by reviewing the documentation on ONAP, without success. They’re important, basic,…
We have at least the as-yet unvoted draft of the FCC’s new position on Net Neutrality, and as accustomed as I am to reading nonsense about developments in tech, the responses here set a new low. I blogged about the issues that the new FCC Chairman (Pai) seemed to be addressing here, and I won’t…
Cisco reported its quarterly numbers, which were still down in revenue terms, but they forecast the first growth in revenue the company has had in about 2 years of reports. “Forecast” isn’t realization of course, but the big question is whether the gains represent what one story describes as “providing an early sign of success…
We have no shortage of orchestration activity in standards groups, and the MEF has redoubled its own Life Cycle Orchestration (LSO) efforts with its new MEF 3.0 announcement. The overall approach is sound at the technical level, meaning that it addresses things like the issues of “federation” of service elements across provider boundaries, but it…