Cisco’s acquisition of CliQr (I hate these fancy multi-case names; they just make it harder for me to type and spell-check so I won’t use the name from here forward!) raises a whole series of questions. Foremost, at the industry-strategic level, is the matter of the value of the hybrid cloud and how that value…
MWC generated a lot of ink, and some of the developments reported by Light Reading, SDx Central, or both create some nice jumping-off points for comments. You’ll probably not be surprised if I have a different spin on many of the things I’ve chosen, and that I hope we can gain some overall sense of…
One of the positive things said recently in the SDN space is that Nokia is very committed to Nuage, the SDN unit that Alcatel-Lucent acquired several years ago. Alcatel-Lucent never played Nuage well in my view, and it offers a number of highly relevant features, enough to make it my favorite among the SDN plays. …
Experience teaches a hard school so they say, but difficulty aside, experience often teaches the only lessons that matter. We’re starting to get some experience in the NFV space. It’s not so much direct deployment experience, because little has really happened to drive the kind of NFV deployment that would serve as the model for…
The headlines say that Telefonica has picked a new integrator for its Unica network program—Ericsson—and that’s true but only sort of. It’s true that Telefonica rebid the integration deal that HPE won originally, and it’s true that Ericsson won the new deal. Ericsson was one of the three choices all along, and the one I’d…
One of the terms you hear more and more in networking is model. We’ve already had a host of MWC announcements that include it (one of them I’ll blog about specifically tomorrow), and the concept of a model is pivotal in NFV and many cloud management systems. If you read network rags, then you know…
When ADVA bought Overture Networks, one of the six companies who I believe has a full-spectrum NFV solution that can make a business case, I was critical of the fact that they seemed to be positioning Overture as a limited extension to the carrier Ethernet business. Now they’ve made their positioning clearer with an announcement…
In many of my past blogs I’ve talked about the question of operations transformation, and proposed that it be considered co-equal to network infrastructure transformation. I’ve also noted that most network operators are weighing the question of how to go about operations transformation. Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because operator views are driven by…
If mobile infrastructure is the target of choice for any aspiring new network technology, then we have to ask why that is in order to decide how new technologies would have to address the future. Everyone knows the answer at a high level—video streaming to mobile devices is the driver of mobile change. It’s not…
One of the lessons of the current earnings cycle is that if you’re a network operator you probably see the profitable side of your future in almost purely mobile terms. For the last ten years, mobile revenues have been strong where wireline has been under pressure. Mobile infrastructure has benefitted from investment priority during that…