What does the data center of the future look like? Or the cloud of the future? Are they related, and if so, how? Google has built data centers and global networks in concert, to the point where arguably the two are faces of the same coin. Amazon and Microsoft have built data centers to be…
Everyone is talking about carrier capex, in some sense or another. If you’re a vendor you know that your buyers have been pinching pennies, and if you’re an operator you know that return on infrastructure is threatening your capital plans. The Street has worried about it too, though more for vendors’ profit impact than for…
Everyone probably knows the old story about trying to identify an elephant behind a curtain. If you grab a leg, you think it’s a tree; grab a trunk and it’s a snake. I’ve been reading the stories on 5G for the week, and it’s hard not to believe that we’re back to groping the elephant…
It is now being widely reported that Cisco is going to undertake a major restructuring. The Street said Cisco would lay off between 12% and 20% of its global workforce, and that it’s related to shifting resources from hardware to software. In their earnings call, Cisco confirmed the latter but said that only about 5,400…
In my blog yesterday, I talked about what operators thought about vCPE and how their views and the demographics of the service market could impact an NFV vision driven by service chaining. I also had a chance to talk with the same operators about the Internet of Things, and I think their views in that…
The big question about any new network technology has always been whether it could raise revenues. Cost reduction is nice, but revenue augmentation is always a lot nicer—if it’s real. With NFV, the focus of the revenue hopes of operators has been virtual CPE (vCPE) that could offer rapid augmentation of basic connection services with…
The transformation of telecommunications and the networks that underlay the industry is coming to grips with what may seem a semantic barrier—what’s the relationship between “open” and “open-source?” This seems to many a frustratingly vague problem to be circling at this critical time; something like the classic arguments about how many angels can dance on…
When is optical networking going to get some respect? That’s certainly a question that optical vendors are asking, and if you think about it, logic would suggest that the area that produces bits should be a major focus when everyone says traffic is exploding. Answering the “When?” question may require understanding why optics isn’t respect-worthy…
One of the positive signs emerging from the ETSI NFV ISG is recent interest in multiple orchestration layers. The notion of a “split orchestration” model that separates traditional NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) from “resource orchestration” could be a powerful enhancement to the basic NFV mode, and perhaps even a step toward embracing a full…
How can it happen? You hear today that a power failure in Delta Airlines’ Atlanta hub put their systems down for an extended period of time. Obviously all of the Delta problems weren’t ongoing IT problems; once you mess up a ballet like airline flight and crew scheduling it’s hard to get everyone dancing in…