At Light Reading’s Big Telecom Event, Cisco SVP of Global Service Provider Delivery Cedrik Neike said that telcos have to transform themselves into platform providers. Well, telcos would agree at least that they have to transform themselves into something other than what they are now—connection and transport providers. Maybe platform providers would be better, but…
The OPNFV project released its first (“Arno”) build, and it may be more noteworthy for how the pieces it contains were selected than for its functionality. There’s logic to how OPNFV did its work, but there are also risks that its order and timing of releases pose. Arno is a platform that includes the infrastructure…
There are a lot of ways to get to LA from NYC and a lot of ways to realize the service agility benefits expected for NFV. Some paths are likely better than others in both these examples, and in both cases it may be necessary to travel a little to know what the best choice…
OpenStack is hot. IBM is going to acquire Blue Box and Cisco is acquiring Piston. You could look at this as a kind of consolidation signal, but I think it has other implications. In fact, it might signal some SDN maturity, some NFV questions, and some cloud directions. OpenStack is obviously the premier approach to…
SDN, NFV, and the cloud all suffer from a common challenge. You have to start somewhere and exercise prudence on creeping scope, but the changes all could make in IT/network practices are so profound that you need to look beyond early applications in search of both an architecture and a mission broad enough to cope…
In a couple blogs last week I was critical of Alcatel-Lucent’s positioning of a new product (NSP) and their expressions of SDN/NFV opportunity in a white paper done in conjunction with AD Little. I also raised questions about their positioning overall, and their ability to deliver on SDN/NFV benefit needs. I had a chance to…
The decision by Intel to acquire custom-chip-and-FPGA vendor Altera is another indicator that networking may be driving incremental opportunity in the server space. As the WSJ points out, more than half of Intel’s operating profits come from servers, though personal-system chips account for most of the company’s revenues. You can’t afford to ignore a change…
One of the interesting things about SDN is that it may be getting clearer because of things going on elsewhere. We still have a lot of SDN-washing, more models of what people like to call “SDN” than most would like, but there’s some clarity emerging on just how SDN might end up deploying. I commented…
Hint: It’s not how you think! HP is certainly at least one of the functionality leaders in the NFV race, and the fact that they’re an IT player is important to senior management at many operators. They’ve won what’s arguably the most important NFV deal yet (Telefonica), and they’re on track to deliver convincingly on…
I often get emails on my blogs from network operators (and of course network vendors too, but those are another story). One of the things I get from those emails that I find particularly fascinating is the difference in perspective on SDN and NFV between the pillars of power in operator organizations. We talk all…