Those who follow my blog know that I’m always talking about the problem of the business case for tech spending. I don’t think many tech vendors are happy with their revenue growth. Could it be that tech has a problem? Almost everyone I talk with would agree. But could it be that tech has a…
If you haven’t had enough of both AI and tech company deals, consider the announcement by Cisco and NVIDIA. The overall goal is pretty clear; support enterprise deployment of AI in their own data centers. There’s also a good chance the move is intended to overhang Juniper’s AI-Native announcement, respond to IBM’s apparent AI success,…
Can we restore the glory days of tech, when computing and networking spending were both growing? There are demand-side opportunities in play, as I said in yesterday’s blog. Tomorrow could bring new stuff. Today, the supply side of networking and the rest of IT is hamstrung by commoditization. There has been no significant differentiation, and…
I’ve been blogging a lot about the forces that are shifting the networking and IT landscapes. There are so many it’s tempting to say that they make forecasting the future as hard as forecasting the weather. Except, of course, everyone probably looks at weather forecasts several times a day. No matter how many butterfly wings…
What is a “technology advance?” To the media, Wall Street, and most vendors, it’s anything that’s new. Hey, this is the community that gave us the Great 5G Fable, after all. But “advance” usually means moving forward, which implies progress against a credible goal. There’s not a lot of that going on, and much of…
We need a fitting way to close our exploration of telecom evolution through “facilitating services”, and the Telecom Ecosystem Group has offered a possible one with their report “An Ecosystem Model: Innovation in the CSP Supply Chain”. While the TEG isn’t strictly a standards body, it is a body I believe to be more rooted…
I’d love to say that security services were the ideal target for telcos’ facilitating services, but as I concluded in my last blog, it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. We can’t evolve to facilitating-service nirvana from a comfortable security starting point. OK, another good way to reach the optimum future is to look…
The best future is one that’s attainable. The most attainable thing is one that builds from the present. The best future that builds from the present builds from the best of the present. In networking, that means security. SDxCentral has a decent piece on a security-first slant to networking we can jump off from. The…
We’re obviously at the “How low can you go?” point in telco capex. We don’t seem to be getting closer to answering the question, either, which has telcos and vendors alike very worried. There are major shifts at work here, created by major forces, and some of those forces are relatively new. The reaction of…
Everyone in any market has to play the game, so to speak. The operative words “play” and “game”, though, have to relate strongly to each other. You can’t run out onto a baseball diamond with a helmet and shoulder pads, expecting to block and tackle. As simple as this lesson may be, there are signs…