We are again seeing stories and comments around “what’s wrong with NFV”. That’s a good thing in that it at least shows awareness that NFV has not met the expectations of most who eagerly supported it four years ago. It’s a bad thing because most of the suggested ills, and therefore the explicit or implied…
Verizon certainly raised a ruckus in the industry with their views on consolidation. The sense of their CEO’s comments was that Verizon was open to a merger that offered them content ownership, and that says a lot about the industry overall. Here we have a giant telco saying that without content ownership their position is…
We are confronted now the need to talk about IBM, not for the first time. The company beat estimates on EPS slightly, with a set of one-time moves that the Street didn’t like much. They missed yet again on revenue, and their shares took a hit (again) as a result. Here is a company who…
There is no shortage of things we inherit from legacy telecom. An increasing number of them are millstones around the neck of transformation, and many of those that are drags are related to management and SLA practices. Those who hanker for the stringent days of TDM SLAs should consider going back in time, but remember…
Transformation, for the network operators, is a long-standing if somewhat vague goal. It means, to most, getting beyond the straight-jacket of revenue dependence on connection services and moving higher on the food chain. Yet, for all the aspirations, the fact is that operators are still looking more at somehow revitalizing connection services than transforming much…
We tend to think of transformation as something that network operators, particularly telcos, have to go through. In point of fact, transformation, meaning technology transformation, is going to happen to everyone, buyers and sellers, operators and enterprises. That truth leaves two questions—what kind of transformation will happen, and how will the players respond to the…
The network of the future might have to evolve from the network of today, but it has to evolve and not take root there. Google has consistently looked first at the future, in network terms in particular, and only then worry about linking the future back to the present. Their latest announced concept, Expresso, has…
One of the questions certain to arise from discussions of service lifecycle management is how VNFs are managed. The pat answer to this is “similar to the way that the physical network functions (PNFs) that the VNFs replace were managed.” Actually, it’s not so pat a response, either. It is very desirable that management practices…
Picking the best approach to service modeling for lifecycle management is like picking the Final Four; there’s no shortage of strongly held opinions. This blog is my view, but as you’ll see I’m not going to war to defend my choice. I’ll lay out the needs, give my views, and let everyone make their own…
Service modeling has to start somewhere, and both the “normal” bottom-up approach and the software-centric top-down approach have their plusses and minuses. Starting at the bottom invites creating an implementation-specific approach that misses a lot of issues and benefits. Starting at the top ignores the reality that operators have an enormous sunk cost in network…