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…
Arista’s quarterly results might be showing us something important about the evolution of networking. The company reported stronger-than-expected revenue, but what surprised many on the Street and in the media was the comment that white-box switching wasn’t seen as competition. That might even be why revenues were better than expected, I think. I also think…
Of all the suppliers (or even alleged suppliers) of NFV, the one who has shown the greatest and fastest gain in credibility is Oracle. Over the last year they’ve jumped from almost-nonentity status to one of the three firms most likely to be called a “market leader” and “thought leader” by operators (Alcatel-Lucent and HP…
Does the Street have it right when they say NFV could hurt Cisco? A Barron’s blog suggests that SDN doesn’t pose much of a threat to Cisco but NFV does, citing a financial analyst’s report. The perspective of Wall Street on tech is sometimes helpful because it exposes the issues that could drive stock prices. …
As an industry, networking has always been very dependent on standards. One big reason is the desire of operators (like all buyers) to avoid vendor lock-in. Standards tend to help make boxes interchangeable, which reduces vendors’ power to control modernization and evolution. SDN and NFV are “standards-based” technologies, so you might think they’d continue this…