I got up this morning and looked in the mirror and found that I wasn’t Bill Gates. I checked my bank balance and investments and I wasn’t a billionaire. There was no shiny new Corvette in my garage. Here’s the question. Does this mean that we’ve entered into an era of retail disillusionment, or does…
More and more people are realizing that the challenge for next-generation networking is basically getting enough of it to matter. Whether we’re talking about replacing switches/routers with white boxes or hosted instances, we aren’t going to justify much excitement if we do that for perhaps two or three percent of the operators’ capital spending. There…
Cisco turned in a decent quarter, particularly considering the state of the network equipment market and the growing concern about the global economy. It’s always nice to have good results to tout to investors, and nice in particular when you need to navigate the usually treacherous path toward next-gen technology without trashing your current revenue…
Everyone wants NFV to succeed including both vendors and operators, and surely the media and analyst communities will find themselves under revenue pressure if NFV fails and something else doesn’t emerge to hype up. From the first, one of the most-promoted examples of NFV has been virtual CPE (vCPE), which propose to substitute hosted connection-point…
If there are hidden issues in SDN and NFV then there surely are in the Internet of Things. IoT, after all, is way ahead in the race to over-hype and perhaps the reason is that the outcome everyone would like to see is decidedly unlikely but decidedly newsworthy. Why not sing for the press and…
While there has certainly been a lot of interest in what the next-generation infrastructure of operators might look like, there’s some indication that operators are thinking less about infrastructure these days. Transformation is still their goal, but more and more are setting their sights higher than the network, and this could have a major impact…
I think that 2016 is a critical year for NFV because this is the year that real deployment models have to be proven out if they’re to impact 2017 costs and revenues. That fact also makes it a critical year for vendors, and so this is a good time to take a look at where…
Cisco’s announcement it was buying Jasper Technologies for its IoT cloud service platform created a lot of buzz, not all of it favorable. Many on the Street think Cisco is paying too much for a market entry play, given that Cisco already has IoT offerings. My view is that there’s good and bad in the…
When I did a survey of operator priorities back in 2013, the top of the list was mobile broadband (88% of operators listed it) and second with 86% was cloud computing. At the end of 2015, mobile broadband’s score was almost identical but cloud computing had fallen astonishingly—to only 71%. Nothing in the history of…
In my blog yesterday I looked at how an optimum evolution of physical and logical networking would impact SDN and NFV. I also pointed out that this kind of radical futuristic outcome would be difficult to bring about. That raises the logical question of just where NFV (in particular) really is today, and where it’s…