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…
I mentioned Brocade and its Vyatta virtual router yesterday, as a proof point that perhaps we have too simplistic a view of the value of “virtualization” in operator transformation. I want to go into the story in more detail now, because there’s a lot of important stuff to be learned. One of the most important…
If the Internet is the source of technology revolution, perhaps we should remember that consumerism is the source of the Internet’s importance. Revolutionizing communications wouldn’t have happened had the Internet stayed a haven for researchers and university eggheads. Given this, we should look to what is or could happen with Internet consumerism to see what…
Transformation is hard. That’s perhaps a simplistic way of summarizing all the things I’ve learned and heard over the last two months, but it certainly reflects operator views. Transformation based on technology changes is so hard, in fact, that a growing number of operators (at the CxO level) aren’t convinced any more that it’s even…
The modern view of a virtual private network is clearly trying to balance the “virtual” part and the “private” part. Private networks based on dedicated per-tenant facilities were the rule up to sometime in the 1980s, when IP VPNs came on the scene and introduced shared-tenant VPNs. Now the VPN space seems to be moving…
Look at the quarterly reports from both vendors and operators and you see all the signs that the traditional model of telco and Internet services is slipping. This, after more than a decade of supposed progress on technologies that would change that, most recently SDN and NFV. So here are the questions we have to…
We need a new way to look at information technology, given the number of different things that are driving change. The categories like “hardware” and “software” don’t suit a virtual world where it’s actually rather difficult to tell what or where something is. Talking about “computing power” is complicated when the computer is virtual and…
What is “cloud computing?” There have been two implicit, competing, contradictory, definitions up to now. The first is that it’s “traditional computing hosted in the cloud”. That implies that the value the cloud brings is largely cost displacement. The other is that it’s “a computing paradigm designed to support virtual, dynamic, processes using a pool…