What would an open networking model really mean? I don’t mean from the perspective of the finances of operators or vendors (that’s obvious at the high level, and complicated enough to warrant a special blog at a lower level). We need to think about what would happen to networks and services if operators had open…
Revolutions have to unite before they can disrupt. A bunch of isolated dissidents can’t really hope to do much except create a higher local noise level, but a united crowd can move a society—or in our case, an industry. Telecom is undergoing a revolution right now, created by the irresistible force of falling operator profit…
Blockchain is another of the modern topics that seems to have a life of its own. The problem is that about half the people who think of blockchain don’t really know what it is, and the other half think it’s all about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The application doesn’t define the technology, or at least it…
The media headline was something like “Oracle rains on the cloud.” Catchy, but is it true? Oracle turned in some worse-than-expected results despite a fairly aggressive stance on cloud computing. Is there an Oracle execution problem, a cloud computing problem, or just a company missing its numbers? We’ll have to dig a bit to see….
In the last week, I’ve done a couple of blogs mentioning P4. It should be clear that I’m a fan of the concept, but I want to point out that P4 is (like many other tech developments) at risk for being overhyped. Does it, as SDxCentral says, “take[s] software-defined networking (SDN) to the next level”? …
One of the big issues in zero-touch automation is event generation. Since management of services and infrastructure is all about responding to events, it’s pretty logical that getting events to respond to is critical, fundamental. It’s not so much that we don’t know how to generate events, as that we don’t necessarily know how to…
If software defines everything, is everything converging? Obviously not, but some software-defined things probably are converging, and there’s no better example than that offered by SDN and SD-WAN. The big questions raised by that convergence are what emerges in the way of a combined model, and what group of vendors/supporters wins in the mash-up. Will…
Remember the AT&T open-source white box switch software? Their announcement of the dNOS white-box operating system was made just three months ago, and open-sourced a month later. Now they have a competing venture, from the ONF, called “Stratum”. What are the two approaches doing, and what impact might they have on the SDN market? Are…
In a couple past blogs on lifecycle management, I mentioned my “older” ExperiaSphere project. The project was one of the earliest tests of zero-touch automation, launched with operator support. There is still some documentation on the ExperiaSphere website, but some of you have asked me to explain the original project, hopefully relating it to the…
If we want to apply cluster techniques to carrier cloud services, we need to first catalog just what kind of services we’re talking about. Otherwise we can’t assess what the feature-hosting mission of carrier cloud technology would be, and without that, we can’t assign infrastructure requirements. You’d think that all this would have been done…