Can the 5G vendor space get any worse? Apparently it can, according to a Light Reading story that quotes a number of analyst firms. Consider this quote: “Research from Omdia, a Light Reading sister company, reads like a horror novel for anyone in the radio access network (RAN) products business.” Well, I agree, obviously. I…
Does the Slowdown in New IT Projects Give Network Vendor Incumbents an Advantage?
I’ve blogged several times in the past about the decline in new-project spending by enterprises, and how that portends for the industry. This is a good time to look at another impact of that new-project starvation, which is the magnification of the benefits of incumbency. Could current network spending patterns be reinforcing the “stay the…
Tech’s Biggest Challenge: Too Much of Too Many
What’s the biggest tech challenge, according to enterprises? Multiplicity. We have too many tech things, too many tech administration tasks, too many product types, too many layers of functionality. Who’s at fault? Enterprises admit that they are largely responsible. Is anything being done about it? Sort of. Management, in particular, feels that it’s buried in…
We Keep Learning Things About the Cloud
What’s going on in the cloud? That’s been a question for over a decade, not so much because we’ve not been able to answer it, as because the answer seems to be constantly changing. There is a lot of change in the cloud, as enterprises and even cloud providers tell me, but there’s also a…
Supervising Autonomy
One of my favorite tech cartoons goes back many decades, to an era where it was common to relate compute power to what might be called “mathematician years”. You’d say “this computer can do in an hour what a hundred mathematicians a decade to do”. In this cartoon, a man comes home, tosses his briefcase…
Has Tech Lost the Chart to Innovation?
How much of our current capex starvation is due to having nothing worthwhile to buy? What role does or should innovation play in product/service evolution? Why are startups and VCs failing to move new things, as we’ve always expected them to? Even some of the best VCs seem to have issues. Now, we’re hearing that…
Could NVIDIA be a Player in the Telco Sector?
Could there be good news for telcos staggering under declining profit pressure? NVIDIA wants to come to their rescue! Of course so does everyone else, and so far “rescue” seems to consist of wanting telcos to spend on the rescuers’ products without any real proof it will help. The question is whether NVIDIA is any…
What Telco and Cableco Earnings Tell Us
Let’s go beyond a “Tale of Two Cities” to a “Tale of Three Operators”. AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon all reported their numbers for the last quarter, and there was some interesting stuff to be learned, mostly by comparing results and delving into how the findings reflect on operators and tech overall. Fierce Network did a…
Can Vendor Strategic Influence Counter IT Spending Pressure?
What is “strategic influence”, how does it impact buyers and sellers, and what do trends in it mean for the tech market? For decades, I’ve worked to model market behavior as a means of providing another data point to surveys, which present a multitude of issues if you rely on them completely. One thing that’s…
Might Software Become More Important than Hardware in Networks?
Is networking heading into a software-first period? Should it be? There are areas on this topic where enterprises and operators agree, areas where those two groups disagree, and areas where there’s more or less agreement within each group. Is there any conclusions to be had from this disorder? Let’s see. Let’s start with some numbers….