Suppose that network operators and vendors accepted the notion that profitable “new” operator services had to be built in a network-integrated way, like IMS/EPC or CDN? What would the framework of these services then look like? How would they have to be offered and used? It’s time to dig deeper into a network-operator-centric view of…
The interest being shown in ONOS’s CORD architecture (see this Light Reading piece) isn’t a surprise to me (see my own blog on it here) but it’s an indication that CORD might be even more influential because of a singular fact—integration and “packaged solutions” are much more in CORD’s DNA. I don’t agree that it’s…
One of the questions that operators are asking in at the end of the first quarter is “Just how much real SDN and NFV do we need?” I pointed out in prior blogs that if you were to do a successful OSS/BSS modernization you could achieve more of the service agility and operations efficiency benefits…
An important question in the NFV space is also a simple and obvious one; “What is a good VNF?” This question is something like the rather plaintive question asked early in the NFV evolution; “Where do I start?” and it’s a close relative to the “What do I do next?” question that many vCPE pioneers…
At the service level we all know that mobile broadband gets most of the capex. In topology terms, the big focus of capex is metro networking. It’s so important it’s even been driving operator M&A. If you look at “opex” in the most general terms, meaning non-capital expenses, you find that paying for backhaul and…
There is absolutely nothing as important to a business as profits. For large public companies in particular, profits are what drive stock prices and for the last decade they’ve also driven executive compensation. If we want to understand businesses as a group, we need to understand how they profit. Which is why some of the…
If my speculation is correct and operations vendors may take the lead in NFV, what happens to all the grand plans the technology has spawned? Remember that my numbers show the ROI on an OSS/BSS modernization to improve operations efficiency and service agility is much better than network modernization based on NFV. Would we strand…
There is probably no issue in technology that gets as much attention as security. Nobody seems to think it’s good enough (and they’re probably right) which means that you can criticize nearly any technology, product, or vendor on the basis of security issues and get a lot of sympathy and attention. So it is with…
You can’t have a market for next-gen tech without a business case for transformation. As the famous saying of Project Mercury, the first step in the US space program went, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” The news out of MWC, recent LinkedIn posts, and other more direct metrics are all showing that vendors and operators…
I hate to blog about vendors two days in a row, but it’s clear that significant stuff is happening at Cisco, who as a market leader in networking is also a major indicator (and driver) of industry trends. Yesterday I talked about their cloud transformation and how it seemed to be hedging against network commoditization. …