Networking is changing, in part because of demand-side forces and in part because of technologies. The question is whether technology changes alone can have an impact, and for that one I went to some buyers to get answers on how they viewed some of the most popular new technology options of our time. The results…
The FCC finally released its neutrality order, causing such a run on the website that it crashed the document delivery portion. Generally, the order is consistent with the preliminary statement on its contents that was released earlier, but now that the full text is available it’s possible to pin down some of the issues I…
While vendors are typically pretty coy about public pronouncements on the direction that networking will take, they often telegraph their visions through their product positioning. I think Alcatel-Lucent did just that with its announcement of its metro-optical extensions to its Photonic Service Switch family. Touting the new offerings as being aimed at aggregation, cloud, and…
I always think it’s interesting when multiple news items combine (or conflict) in a way that exposes issues and market conditions. We have that this week with the Cisco/Microsoft cloud partnership, new-model servers from HP, a management change at Verizon, and Juniper’s router announcements. All of these create a picture of a seismic shift in…
OPNFV, the Linux Foundation open-source project for NFV, is getting ready to release its first preliminary code. Everyone, including me, is rooting for a success in creating first a reference implementation of NFV that’s functionally complete and second an open-source framework for that implementation. My concern is as it’s always been; do we know that…
Apple announced the details on its Apple Watch, which some will call a revolution and others (including me) will yawn at. It’s the first truly new product from Apple in about five years, the latest darling of the wearable technology niche, loved by Apple fans for sure. The question is whether it will really amount…
According to a couple recent surveys, TV viewing is dropping in the 18-34 year old age group. Some are already predicting that this will mean the end of broadcast TV, cable, and pretty much the media World as We Know It. Certainly there are major changes coming, but the future is more complicated than the…
At MWC, US FCC Chairman Wheeler tried to clarify (some would say “defend”) the Commission’s Neutrality Order. At almost the same time Ciena released its quarterly numbers, which were light on the revenue line. I think the combination of these two events defines the issues that network operators face globally. I just wish they defined…
In some recent chats with enterprise CIOs, I noticed that there were some who were thinking a bit differently about the cloud. Their emerging views were aligned with a Microsoft Azure commercial on sequencing genomes, though it wasn’t possible to tell whether Microsoft influenced their thinking or they set the tone for Microsoft. Whatever the…
We had a number of “NFV announcements” at MWC and like many such announcements they illustrate the challenge of defining what “NFV” is. Increasingly it seems to be the carrier cloud, and the questions that raises are “why?” and “will this contaminate NFV’s value proposition?” NFV has always had three components. One is the virtual…