Everyone tells us that service composition based on software tools is critical. Operators say that “agility” in service creation would help them address opportunities faster and better, and vendors think it would promote their products in a market that’s increasingly price-competitive. Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that there doesn’t seem to be a unified position on…
There has been a lot of recent discussion about SD-WAN technology and its potential. Not surprisingly, most of it has been marred by our industry tendency to over-generalize, to seize on a term that describes a host of options and presume that all the options are really the same. SD-WAN is really important, but not…
After my blog on Cisco’s intent networking initiative yesterday, I got some questions from operator friends on the issue of modeling. We hear a lot about it in networking—“service models” or “intent models”, but typically with a prequalifier. What’s a “model” and why have one? I think the best answer to that is to harken…
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…