Getting closer to the buyer and to the dollars is always good advice in positioning a product or service. For network operators, that means looking at what services they sell, and for network operators reviewing the potential of SDN/NFV, it means looking at how these new technologies can improve their services. But “services” doesn’t necessarily…
Verizon has just released a white paper on its SDN/NFV strategy, developed with the help of a number of major vendors, and the paper exposes a number of interesting insights into Tier One next-gen network planning. Some are more detailed discussions of things Verizon has revealed in the past, and some new and interesting. This…
I got back from a holiday to a flood of data from both enterprises and network operators/service providers—the former group focusing on cloud and network service views, and the latter group focusing on NFV. Because all the data is so interesting I thought it was important to get it into a blog ASAP, so here…
I had a very interesting talk with the MEF and with their new CTO (Pascal Menezes), covering their “Third Network”, “Lifecycle Service Orchestration” and other things. If you’ve read my stuff before, you know that there are many aspects of their strategy that I think are insightful, even compelling. I’m even more sure about that…
You can certainly tell from the media coverage that progress on NFV isn’t living up to press expectations. That’s not surprising on two fronts; first, press expectations border on an instant gratification fetish that nothing could live up to, and second that transformation of a three-trillion-dollar industry with average capital cycles of almost six years…
Ericsson has made some pretty smart moves in the past, long before their smartness was obvious to the market. They may have made another one with their acquisition of NodePrime, an hyperscale data center management company that could be a stepping stone for Ericsson to supremacy in a number of cloud-related markets, including of course…
The sweet spot for NFV so far has been virtual CPE (vCPE) and the sweet spot for vCPE has been managed services. Nearly every operator out there has managed services ambitions at some level, but at least three out of four admit that they’re planning in a more hopeful-than-helpful sense. Is there a right, or…
Last week there were a number of stories out on virtual reality (VR). It’s not that the notion is new; gaming developers have tried to deliver on it for a decade or more, and Google’s Glass was an early VR-targeted product. One interesting one was a joke. On April 1st, Google spoofed the space with…
Any acquisition by a major market player like IBM is news, and yesterday’s announcement that IBM was acquiring Bluewolf, a Salesforce professional services firm, could be big news. According to the press release cited here, the deal will “Accelerate Cloud-based Customer Experiences for Salesforce Users,” and the obvious question is why IBM would want to…
The acquisition of StackStorm by Brocade raises (again) the question of the best way to approach the automation of deployment and operations processes. We’ve had a long evolution of software-process or lifecycle automation and I think this deal shows that we’re far from being at the end of it. Most interesting, though, is the model…