Financial presentations, the things that companies give to Wall Street analysts at conferences, can represent a very useful way of gathering insight on companies and markets. Unlike earnings calls, which have to follow a pathway that’s heavily influenced by regulatory oversight, conferences can be free-form and often more revealing of current thinking and future directions….
Progressions are always interesting things to look at. That’s particularly true when they represent a change in thinking about a topic that’s important to both buyers and sellers of technology. It’s perhaps even more true when the progression we’re considering isn’t really recognized, and so its value and future importance isn’t recognized either. That’s the…
The Broadcom deal with VMware has finally closed, which ends one element of confusion swirling around the companies. It doesn’t end all the elements, though. In fact, I think the finalization of the deal raises a lot of questions, not only for Broadcom and VMware, but also for the tech space overall. The big question?…
We hear all the time that online experiences are growing in importance to consumers and workers. We hear that we’re all integrating our phones and the stuff that’s delivered through them with our everyday lives. We hear that the line between the real world and the virtual world is getting blurred, and that new developments…
Let’s face it, AI is a bit of a mess. Even among technologists, AI literacy is down in the bearskin-and-stone-knives level. Buyers don’t understand what aspects of AI technology connect to useful business missions, though they still believe that somehow it could be transformational. The space is tied to supergenius technical types, supergreedy VC types,…
When there are articles coming out that say that network vendors are having not only a bad year but a bad decade, you have to believe something just might be wrong. Of course, it is, and most of Wall Street believes that Cisco’s quarter was a pretty solid indicator of the problems that vendors are…
I’ve blogged several times recently about the issues facing network operators, and the remedies that they might be considering. Operators have been telling me about these problems for almost exactly twenty years now, which raises two questions. First, why don’t we hear them raising them more publicly? Second, why hasn’t something been done? We have…
If abstraction is the key concept in virtualization, then you might wonder why it’s not been played in the market explicitly. It has, in multiple forms, but not in a way that linked explicitly to the abstraction concept. Now, though, Microsoft has launched Radius, a “cloud-native” application platform that abstracts the stuff it runs on,…
According to the song, “To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season turn, turn, turn….” That’s surely true for network operator service revenue opportunities, and one thing that all 88 of the operators I talked with this year have made that clear. The biggest problem, according to 57 of the operators is the “challenge…
If you want to raise profit per bit as a network operator, you have to raise revenues, lower costs, or both. For decades, operators enjoyed significant growth in mobile services and even good growth in wireline broadband, which gave them a cushion in terms of profit, but even during that period, profit per bit was…