What exactly is “service automation” and who does it? Those are the two questions that are top of the list for network operators and cloud providers today, and they’re ranking increasingly high on the list of enterprises as well. As the complexity of networks increases, as technology changes introduce hosted elements in addition to discrete…
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been a focus for operators for five years now. Anyone who’s following my blog knows I have disagreed with the approach the NFV ISG has taken, but it took it. The current model will never, in my view, be optimal, as I’ve said many times in past blogs and media…
Network operators generally do a fall technology plan to frame their following-year budget. The timing varies with geography and operator, but most are active between mid-September and mid-November. This year, a fair number of operators have done some pre-planning, and we can actually see the results in their quarterly earnings calls, as well as the…
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…