Google opened a lot of interesting topics with its developer conference this week, and I think there’s a common theme here that aligns with other industry moves and foretells something even more important. We are moving closer to the concept of the digital assistant as our window on the world, and that could open a…
Juniper had a Wall Street event earlier this week and analysts used terms like “constructive” and “realistic” to describe what the company said. The central focus in a technical sense was SDN and the cloud, not separately as much as in combination. Juniper’s estimates for growth through 2019 were slightly ahead of Street consensus, so…
I had an opportunity this week to look over some material from Netcracker on their notion of a “digital service provider”, part of the documentation that relates to their Agile Virtualization Platform concept. I also reviewed what was available on the technology and architecture of AVP. I find the technology fascinating and the research and…
One of the persistent questions with both SDN and NFV is how the service management or lifecycle management processes would work. Any time that a network service requires cooperative behavior among functional elements, the presumption is that all the elements have to be functioning. Even with standard services, meaning services over legacy networks, that can…
Overlay networks have been a topic for this blog fairly often recently, but given that more operators (including, recently, Comcast) have come out in favor of them, I think it’s time to look at how overlay technology might impact network investment overall. After all, if overlay networking becomes mainstream, something of that magnitude would have…
I blogged yesterday about the OPNFV project for Event Streams and the need to take a broad view of event-driven software as a precursor to exploring the best way to standardize event coding and exchange. It occurred to me that we’re facing the same sort of problem with IoT, focusing on things that would matter…
One of those who comment regularly on my blog brought a news item to my attention. The OPNFV project has a new activity, introduced by AT&T, called “Event Streams” and defined HERE. The purpose of the project is to create a standard format for sending event data from the Service Assurance component of NFV to…
Operators want open source software and they want OCP hardware, or so they say. It would seem that the trend overall is to stamp out vendors, but of course neither of these things really stamp out vendor relationships. They might have an impact on the buyer/seller relationship, though, and on the way that operators buy…
At the TMF event in Nice Verizon opened yet another discussion, or perhaps I should say “reopened” because the topic came up way back in April 2013 and it was just as divisive then. It’s the topic of “microservices” or breaking down virtual functions into very small components. NetCracker also had some things to say…
There is an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from recent industry announcements: Vendors have lost control of SDN and NFV, which means they’ve lost control of the evolution of networking. Operators, in a state of self-described frustration with their vendors’ support for transformation goals, have taken matters into their own hands. I’ve gotten emails over…