Open architectures for IT have a profound impact on the sales process. In the old days, when a vendor sold a complete proprietary IT ecosystem, you pitched your benefits holistically and when you won you won it all. When things shifted to an open framework, with COTS servers and Linux operating systems, the “sale” was…
NFV has a lot of constituencies to appease within each operator to get to deployment, and so far engagement has largely been with the CTO organizations. I’ve noted in past blogs that the operators’ CFOs are concerned about the NFV business case and CIOs are concerned about operations. I thought it might be interesting to…
I blogged earlier this week about the “fall planning cycle” for network operators, and the issues and forces associated with that cycle this year. An obvious follow-on question is how vendors will be impacted by the cycle. Will some be hurt by events, others helped, and is there still time to move yourself from the…
If you look at the combined state of networking and IT, the most interesting thing is the fact that it’s getting harder to find the boundary point. We’ve been linking the two since online applications in the ‘60s. Now, componentization of software, virtualization of resources, and mobility have combined to build agile applications that move…
The consensus among network operators who provide either wireline or wireless broadband is that they’ll cross over on the revenue/cost per bit by mid-2017. Given the time it takes to make any significant changes in service offerings, operations practices, or capital infrastructure programs, something remedial would have to begin next year to be effective. In…
I suspect that almost everyone involved in NFV would agree that it’s a work in progress. Operators I’ve talked with through the entire NFV cycle—from the Call for Action white paper in the fall of 2012 to today—exhibit a mixture of hope and frustration. The top question these operators ask today is how the NFV…
Cisco beat estimates in its quarter, coming in about where I’d suggested it might overall. The Street is happy with the results, which they should be, and the question now is how the details of Cisco’s performance might signal us toward a view of the next year. I think one key statement from the call,…
I did a blog early this week on the foundation for an agile service-model approach. Some of my operator friends were particularly interested in this topic, more than I thought frankly. Most of it was centered on how this sort of model would be applied during the routine processes of building and selling services. If…
Wall Street will be watching Cisco on their earnings call this week. I will to, and so should you all, but probably with a different set of goals and looking for signals only slightly related to the Street interest. Cisco is an important player whose behavior will tell us a lot about the timing and…
Composing services in an agile and market-responsive way is a critical requirement for the future of network operators. That means it’s critical that technologies like SDN and NFV support it, and if proponents of those technologies want to play the agility card to justify their preferred revolution, then their technology has to support it better…