The announcement that Telefonica has turned to Huawei for its virtual EPC is certainly of major significance. Huawei is the only major telecom vendor who’s managed to gain significantly in revenue over the last several years, largely due to its price-leader status. Competitors like Cisco, Ericsson, and Nokia have hoped to wrestle away some market…
Cisco announced it was buying AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring (APM) company, snatching (literally) the company from an IPO that was already oversubscribed. The price tag, $3.7 billion, raised a lot of eyebrows in the financial community. Most agree that Cisco (like everyone in the IT space) needs to get more software-centric, but the question…
I did a blog earlier about the impact of smartphones on the mobile opportunity and also the way the devices have changed our culture, particularly for the young. Nielson has released some interesting data on video behavior that relates to smartphone and online video use, and I want to recap what the report shows. There’s…
I blogged recently about the three categories of operators, categories divided by the operators’ thinking on the path to transformation and the role of things like SDN and NFV. It’s only fair to do the same thing now with the network vendors, who also happen to divide into three categories. Where the operators divide based…
I remember (with little enthusiasm, frankly) my high-school Latin experience. One fact I can still draw from those days is that “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” Well, so are all operators. Regulations, markets, technology and vendor commitments, and management and business goals all tend to make each operator an entity unto itself, but…
The future of networking, like the future of practically everything else, is largely dictated by return on investment, meaning the balance of costs and revenues for all the players. I think 2017 is going to be a pivotal year, in no small part because network operators have predicted this will be the year where their…
One of the most important elements in service provider transformation is hardly ever talked about. It’s the portal that would provide users and operator personnel with access to information. Since service automation is the critical goal of transformation, and since there clearly has to be a different approach when communicating with an automated lifecycle process,…
Virtual functions and NFV are all about virtualizing network features, right? Well, perhaps not. There is increased interest in looking at application components as virtual functions, and this trend might be critical in justifying the carrier cloud, and even in supporting NFV’s narrower goal. It might not be too much of a stretch for current…
I almost hate to do a blog on what 2017 holds for networking, and for network operators in particular; that kind of analysis is almost a cliché. In this case, though, it might be important to look ahead to the coming year because it could include some fairly cataclysmic events and changes. At least I…