If there are hidden issues in SDN and NFV then there surely are in the Internet of Things. IoT, after all, is way ahead in the race to over-hype and perhaps the reason is that the outcome everyone would like to see is decidedly unlikely but decidedly newsworthy. Why not sing for the press and…
While there has certainly been a lot of interest in what the next-generation infrastructure of operators might look like, there’s some indication that operators are thinking less about infrastructure these days. Transformation is still their goal, but more and more are setting their sights higher than the network, and this could have a major impact…
I think that 2016 is a critical year for NFV because this is the year that real deployment models have to be proven out if they’re to impact 2017 costs and revenues. That fact also makes it a critical year for vendors, and so this is a good time to take a look at where…
Cisco’s announcement it was buying Jasper Technologies for its IoT cloud service platform created a lot of buzz, not all of it favorable. Many on the Street think Cisco is paying too much for a market entry play, given that Cisco already has IoT offerings. My view is that there’s good and bad in the…
When I did a survey of operator priorities back in 2013, the top of the list was mobile broadband (88% of operators listed it) and second with 86% was cloud computing. At the end of 2015, mobile broadband’s score was almost identical but cloud computing had fallen astonishingly—to only 71%. Nothing in the history of…
In my blog yesterday I looked at how an optimum evolution of physical and logical networking would impact SDN and NFV. I also pointed out that this kind of radical futuristic outcome would be difficult to bring about. That raises the logical question of just where NFV (in particular) really is today, and where it’s…
What exactly might a next-generation network look like? If we actually try to answer that question it becomes clear that there are two parallel visions to contend with. On the physical side, we have to build the network with fiber transport and something electrical above it, whether it’s a set of special-function devices or hosted…
The number one issue with making an NFV business case is that of service automation. Any talk about “operations efficiency” or “service agility” that doesn’t start with the assumption that service activity is automated is just a waste of breath. In addition, if we don’t have very precise notions of how we’d manage the incremental…
The concept of serendipity is dear to everyone. You find a winning lottery ticket, dig up a pipe and find a stash of buried treasure, and (if you’re a network vendor) do a bunch of stupid stuff that somehow adds up to putting you in the right place at the right time. Well, it’s nice…
We are starting to see earnings reports from technology giants and the results so far aren’t particularly pretty. We are what we sell, in this industry as in all industries, and so it’s important to look at the trends reflected in quarterly reports to see what’s really happening in our industry. Today I want to…