Ericsson has made some pretty smart moves in the past, long before their smartness was obvious to the market. They may have made another one with their acquisition of NodePrime, an hyperscale data center management company that could be a stepping stone for Ericsson to supremacy in a number of cloud-related markets, including of course…
The sweet spot for NFV so far has been virtual CPE (vCPE) and the sweet spot for vCPE has been managed services. Nearly every operator out there has managed services ambitions at some level, but at least three out of four admit that they’re planning in a more hopeful-than-helpful sense. Is there a right, or…
Last week there were a number of stories out on virtual reality (VR). It’s not that the notion is new; gaming developers have tried to deliver on it for a decade or more, and Google’s Glass was an early VR-targeted product. One interesting one was a joke. On April 1st, Google spoofed the space with…
Any acquisition by a major market player like IBM is news, and yesterday’s announcement that IBM was acquiring Bluewolf, a Salesforce professional services firm, could be big news. According to the press release cited here, the deal will “Accelerate Cloud-based Customer Experiences for Salesforce Users,” and the obvious question is why IBM would want to…
The acquisition of StackStorm by Brocade raises (again) the question of the best way to approach the automation of deployment and operations processes. We’ve had a long evolution of software-process or lifecycle automation and I think this deal shows that we’re far from being at the end of it. Most interesting, though, is the model…
If you look at or listen to network operator presentations on next-gen networking, you’re struck by the sense that operators don’t trust vendors any more. They don’t come out and say that, but all the discussions about “open” approaches and “lock-in” demonstrate a healthy disdain for their suppliers’ trustworthiness, and just the fact that major…
There are a lot of network options out there, and while it’s fun to talk about them in technology terms there may be a more fundamental issue to address. Network services have always involved multiple layers, and it’s always been convenient to think of infrastructure as being either “connection” or “transport”. In the classic services…
We chase a lot of phantoms in the tech space, none as dangerous as the old “five-nines” paradigm. Everyone obsesses about getting reliability/availability up to the standards of TDM. That’s not going to happen unless we don’t do the kind of network transformation we’re talking about. Five-nines is too expensive to meet, and we don’t…
Cisco’s apparent reorganization and retargeting of its strategic initiatives is certainly newsworthy, given Cisco’s position both as the premier provider of IP technology and its UCS data center systems. It’s also newsworthy that Cisco is clearly emphasizing the cloud and IoT over traditional networking missions. The question is what these newsworthy events mean in the…
What exactly is the data center interconnect (DCI) opportunity, and how does it relate to cloud computing, SDN, NFV, and the cloud? That’s a question that should be asked, isn’t asked often, and might have a significant impact on the way we build the most important part of our network. Obviously it’s going to have…