We all believe that carrier networks are changing, and anyone who ever took a business course knows that industries are changed by changes in their profit picture or regulations. The business trends of the network operators is one of many issues that’s pushed under the rug when we talk about new technologies like SDN or…
If there’s a front line for NFV, that front line is the sales effort. Since I’ve started to blog about the difficulties associated with making the NFV business case, I’ve gotten a lot of comments from salespeople who are charged with the responsibility of doing that. I’ve tabulated just shy of 30 of these, and…
I’ve noted in the past that it’s proven difficult to make a business case for NFV. Rather than address that point now, I propose to ask “But what if it can?” Remember that while I’m unimpressed (to say the least) with efforts to paint a plausible picture to justify NFV deployment, I believe firmly that…
One of the recurring points I make in my blogs about SDN and NFV is the need for a business case. Most are aware that “business case” means a financial justification of an investment or project, but I’ve gotten some questions from some who’d like to understand a bit more about the process of “making”…
Vice presidents of operations at the network operators, especially the telcos, think that the solution to NFV silo risk is to do a better job of “federation”. That term is one often used to describe the interconnection of elements across administrative or technical boundaries. If a network isn’t built in a truly homogeneous way, then…
Many of you have noticed the fact that my blog on the “missing NFV constituencies” of CIO and CFO was still missing a constituency or two. The ones I didn’t cover are the head of operations, and the CMO, and the reason I didn’t is that I was still massing the comments I’d had from…
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…