IBM’s earnings are always interesting, and right now they’re downright critical. First, obviously, IBM needs to show it’s getting back on track or it risks a loss of customer credibility that would quickly become impossible to stem. But second, IBM is likely a barometer for the pace of change in the IT market. Big guys…
The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent is clearly a consolidation. The question is what the companies see as the end-game. Consolidation is usually a market response to commoditization, to the loss of pricing power that comes when no meaningful feature differentiation is possible. Consolidation can also be a step toward taking a leadership position in…
Everyone in NFV is jumping on “service agility” as the key benefit, and I don’t disagree that the value NFV could bring to launching new services could be the best justification for deploying it. Wishing won’t make it so, though, and I don’t think we’ve had enough dialog on how one makes a service “agile”. …
Oracle has started demoing their new NFV/orchestration stuff, and anything Oracle does in the space is important because the company represents a slightly different constituency in the NFV vendor spectrum. They’re definitely not a network equipment player so NFV isn’t a risk to their core business. They do sell servers, but that’s not their primary…
For my last topic in the exploration of operator lessons from early SDN/NFV activity, I want to pursue one of the favorite trite topics of vendors; “customer experience”. I watched a Cisco video on the topic from the New IP conference, and while it didn’t IMHO demonstrate much insight, it does illustrate the truth that…
I’m continuing to work through information I’ve been getting from operators worldwide on the lessons they’re learning from SDN and NFV trials and PoCs. The focus of today is the relationship between OSS/BSS and these new technologies. Despite the fact that operators say they are still not satisfied with the level of operations integration into…
Networking and IT have always been “frenemies”. They often compete for budgeting in the enterprises, they certainly have competed for power in the CIO organization. One of the interesting charts I used to draw in trade show presentations tracked how the two areas were competing for “feature opportunity”. By the year 2010, my model showed,…
Virtualization changes a lot of stuff in IT and in networking, for two principle reasons. One is that it breaks the traditional ties between functionality (in the form of software) and resources (both servers and associated connection-network elements). The other is that it creates resource relationships that don’t map to physical links or paths. The…
I blogged recently about the importance of creating NFV services based on an agile markup-like model rather than based on static explicit data models. My digging through NFV PoCs and implementations has opened up other issues that can also impact the success of an NFV deployment, and I want to address two of them today. …
Here’s a riddle for you. What do Fedex and NFV have in common? Answer: Maybe nothing, and that’s a problem. A review of some NFV trials and implementations, and even some work in the NFV ISG, is demonstrating that we’re not always getting the “agility” we need, and for a single common reason. I had…