At the service level we all know that mobile broadband gets most of the capex. In topology terms, the big focus of capex is metro networking. It’s so important it’s even been driving operator M&A. If you look at “opex” in the most general terms, meaning non-capital expenses, you find that paying for backhaul and…
There is absolutely nothing as important to a business as profits. For large public companies in particular, profits are what drive stock prices and for the last decade they’ve also driven executive compensation. If we want to understand businesses as a group, we need to understand how they profit. Which is why some of the…
If my speculation is correct and operations vendors may take the lead in NFV, what happens to all the grand plans the technology has spawned? Remember that my numbers show the ROI on an OSS/BSS modernization to improve operations efficiency and service agility is much better than network modernization based on NFV. Would we strand…
There is probably no issue in technology that gets as much attention as security. Nobody seems to think it’s good enough (and they’re probably right) which means that you can criticize nearly any technology, product, or vendor on the basis of security issues and get a lot of sympathy and attention. So it is with…
You can’t have a market for next-gen tech without a business case for transformation. As the famous saying of Project Mercury, the first step in the US space program went, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” The news out of MWC, recent LinkedIn posts, and other more direct metrics are all showing that vendors and operators…
I hate to blog about vendors two days in a row, but it’s clear that significant stuff is happening at Cisco, who as a market leader in networking is also a major indicator (and driver) of industry trends. Yesterday I talked about their cloud transformation and how it seemed to be hedging against network commoditization. …
Cisco’s acquisition of CliQr (I hate these fancy multi-case names; they just make it harder for me to type and spell-check so I won’t use the name from here forward!) raises a whole series of questions. Foremost, at the industry-strategic level, is the matter of the value of the hybrid cloud and how that value…
MWC generated a lot of ink, and some of the developments reported by Light Reading, SDx Central, or both create some nice jumping-off points for comments. You’ll probably not be surprised if I have a different spin on many of the things I’ve chosen, and that I hope we can gain some overall sense of…
One of the positive things said recently in the SDN space is that Nokia is very committed to Nuage, the SDN unit that Alcatel-Lucent acquired several years ago. Alcatel-Lucent never played Nuage well in my view, and it offers a number of highly relevant features, enough to make it my favorite among the SDN plays. …
Experience teaches a hard school so they say, but difficulty aside, experience often teaches the only lessons that matter. We’re starting to get some experience in the NFV space. It’s not so much direct deployment experience, because little has really happened to drive the kind of NFV deployment that would serve as the model for…