Cisco has announced it’s going to support, and perhaps even focus on, “intent-based” networking. At one level this could be viewed as a vindication of a widely held view that intent-modeling is the essential (and perhaps under-supplied or even missing) ingredient in the progression of virtualization. At another level, it could be seen as another…
Back in the days of the public switched telephone network, everyone understood what “signaling” was. We had an explicit signaling network, SS7, that mediated how resources were applied to calls and managed the progression of connections through the hierarchy of switches. The notion of signaling changed with IP networks, and I’m now hearing from operators…
Every vendor wants to sit astride the critical value propositions, and in networking that’s particularly true. With capital spending under pressure, it’s crucial to have some strong value propositions you can spout to impress buyers. The problem has been that “value” really means either cost or revenue, and much of networking is insulated from both…
In past blogs, I’ve said that there were three dominant drivers for transformational change in networking. One is carrier cloud (which of course has its own drivers), one is 5G, and the last is IoT. Given that the industry is fast-paced, it’s a good time to look at where we stand on each, based on…
If networks are truly software-defined, what defines the software that defines them? This is not only the pivotal question in the SDN and NFV space, but perhaps the pivotal question in the evolution of networks. We knew how to build open, interoperable networks using fixed devices like switches and routers, but it’s increasingly clear that…
We seem to be in an “everything as a service age”, or at least in an age where somebody is asserting that everything might be made available that way. Everything isn’t a service, though. Modern applications tend to divide into processes stimulated by a simple event, and processes that introduce context into event-handling. We have…
Amazon is making its Greengrass functional programming cloud-to-premises bridge available to all customers, and Nokia has already announced its support on Nokia Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) gear. This is an important signal to the market in the area of IoT, and also a potentially critical step in deciding whether edge (fog) computing or centralized cloud…
Sometimes words trip us up, and that’s particularly true in tech these days. Say we start with a new term, like NFV. It has a specific technical meaning, but we have an industry-wide tendency to overhype things in their early stages, and vendors jump onto the concept with offerings and announcements that really aren’t strongly…
The “carrier cloud” should be the real focus of transformation. For operators, it epitomizes the shift from connectivity technology to hosting technology, and for vendors a change from network equipment to servers and software. Things like SDN and NFV are not goals; they are important only insofar as they can be linked to a migration…
Cisco is arguably the technology powerhouse of networking, not to mention the marketing gorilla and the emerging leader in the efforts of network vendors to broaden their base in response to declining capex. Network functions virtualization (NFV) is arguably the natural fusion of IT and networking, and a logical place for a vendor with broader…