The news that Cisco and Ericsson are forming a marketing partnership isn’t a big surprise, given the Nokia deal for Alcatel-Lucent earlier. It’s still big news in the industry, though, and perhaps bigger if one casts it into position alongside another news item, which is that Verizon is looking to sell off its cloud business. …
I got a laugh at a conference back in the past when I commented that to the media, any new technology had to be either the single-handed savior of western culture, or the last bastion of international communism. Anything in between wasn’t going to generate clicks on the pieces, and it was too complicated to…
Suppose you’re a network operator and you want to run an NFV trial. You need to make a business case to justify a considerable NFV program. Given all of the difficulties that you know others have faced, what do you do? This is a nice question to end a week on, so let’s look at…
Light Reading posted an interesting article on the commitment of network operators to NFV despite uncertainty about how they’d be expected to integrate with OSS/BSS. There are some parallels between the comments made and my own interactions with the operators, but I’ve also had some discussions about the issue at greater depth, and I want…
If you’ve tracked both SDN and NFV carefully, as I have, you’ve probably noticed that the value propositions for both have shifted or evolved over time. Service revenue increases are great, but you have to be able to justify them with some hard opportunity numbers. Where are the brass rings with new SDN and NFV…
There is no doubt that virtual CPE is the most populist of the NFV applications. There are more vendors who support it than any other NFV application, and more users who could potentially be touched by it. vCPE is also arguably the most successful NFV application, measured by the number of operators who have actually…
The issues I’ve raised on the difficulties operators experience making a business case for SDN and NFV are increasingly echoed by other sources, so I hope that at this point most objective people believe there is a problem here. One question, then, is how business-case difficulties might impact SDN and NFV deployment and the future…
Verizon’s entry into the IoT space, via its “ThingSpace” API offering, has been covered by Light Reading and also released directly by Verizon. The company is also opening its analytics engine for IoT use and making some network and pricing changes to accommodate IoT. Verizon’s launch presentation on IoT properly characterizes IoT as a “Tower…
Federation is an important topic in both SDN and NFV for a number of reasons, but it’s not clear that the standards processes for either SDN or NFV are really moving to define a reasonable strategy. The issues of federation will eventually have to be faced—there are some indications that vendors are jumping out to…
Before I took off on my vacation (just completed), I asked a bunch of my CFO contacts to review a document I prepared that outlined potential sources of NFV (or SDN) benefits. They came back with some suggested changes and additions, and the result was a document with about 20 categories. I’d also outlined some…