Experience teaches a hard school so they say, but difficulty aside, experience often teaches the only lessons that matter. We’re starting to get some experience in the NFV space. It’s not so much direct deployment experience, because little has really happened to drive the kind of NFV deployment that would serve as the model for…
The headlines say that Telefonica has picked a new integrator for its Unica network program—Ericsson—and that’s true but only sort of. It’s true that Telefonica rebid the integration deal that HPE won originally, and it’s true that Ericsson won the new deal. Ericsson was one of the three choices all along, and the one I’d…
One of the terms you hear more and more in networking is model. We’ve already had a host of MWC announcements that include it (one of them I’ll blog about specifically tomorrow), and the concept of a model is pivotal in NFV and many cloud management systems. If you read network rags, then you know…
When ADVA bought Overture Networks, one of the six companies who I believe has a full-spectrum NFV solution that can make a business case, I was critical of the fact that they seemed to be positioning Overture as a limited extension to the carrier Ethernet business. Now they’ve made their positioning clearer with an announcement…
In many of my past blogs I’ve talked about the question of operations transformation, and proposed that it be considered co-equal to network infrastructure transformation. I’ve also noted that most network operators are weighing the question of how to go about operations transformation. Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because operator views are driven by…
If mobile infrastructure is the target of choice for any aspiring new network technology, then we have to ask why that is in order to decide how new technologies would have to address the future. Everyone knows the answer at a high level—video streaming to mobile devices is the driver of mobile change. It’s not…
One of the lessons of the current earnings cycle is that if you’re a network operator you probably see the profitable side of your future in almost purely mobile terms. For the last ten years, mobile revenues have been strong where wireline has been under pressure. Mobile infrastructure has benefitted from investment priority during that…
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…