What’s the thing (well, one of the things) I’m sick of hearing? It is that, as Michael Dell and others have said recently, “It’s definitely a multi-cloud world.” Why am I sick of it? Two reasons. First, because it’s never been anything else, and the fact that’s only now recognized is a sad commentary on…
Everyone loves to talk about APIs, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking that they were the solution to all of the problems of the tech world. I did a straw poll, and wasn’t too surprised to find that only about 40% of network professionals had a good grasp of what APIs…
It’s always popular to talk about who’s going to lead the next big step in something. In networking these days, you might look to Cisco’s Robbins, for example. I have my own candidate, one many of you may never heard about. It’s Ajit Pai. Pai is the new Chairman of the FCC, and like all…
They say that Microsoft is acquiring CycleComputing for its high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities, combating Amazon and Google. They’re only half-right. It’s combating Amazon and Google, but not so much about HPC. It’s mostly about coordinating workflows in an event-driven world. Traditional computing is serial in nature; you run a program from start to finish. Even…
The Street report that ATT is considering the sale of its Digital Life division should have a lot of telco transformation people on edge. This is the division that handles consumer offerings like home security, long seen as the basis for any shift of a network operator into non-connection services. Is it not working? Worse,…
One of the key pieces of network functions virtualization (NFV) is the “virtual infrastructure manager” or VIM. In the E2E ETSI model for NFV, the VIM takes instructions from the management and orchestration element (MANO) and translates them to infrastructure management and control processes. One of the challenges for NFV implementation is just what shape…
If we assume that the notion of an event-driven cloud is correct, we have to ask ourselves what that cloud model would do to the way edge devices get information and content. If the cloud is a new computing paradigm, does the paradigm extend to the edge? How does it then impact the way we…
Cisco reported roughly in-line numbers for the quarter but the stock was down over 2% because it is still reporting a sequential decline in revenues. Guidance was also at the low end of Street expectations, which further suggests a “no-improvement” scenario, and there was special Street concern for the fact that security products didn’t do…
After my blog on a model-driven service lifecycle management technique, I got a bunch of emails from operator and vendor contacts (and from some who’d never contacted me). Part of the interest was driven by a Light Reading article that noted my skepticism about the way that ETSI NFV was being implemented. Most was driven…
Have you noticed that in the last six months, we’ve been having more stories about “cloud” networking and fewer about SDN or NFV? Sure, it’s easy to say (and also true, as it happens) that the media jumps off a technology once it becomes too complicated to cover or is discredited in terms of impact…