When there are articles coming out that say that network vendors are having not only a bad year but a bad decade, you have to believe something just might be wrong. Of course, it is, and most of Wall Street believes that Cisco’s quarter was a pretty solid indicator of the problems that vendors are…
I’ve blogged several times recently about the issues facing network operators, and the remedies that they might be considering. Operators have been telling me about these problems for almost exactly twenty years now, which raises two questions. First, why don’t we hear them raising them more publicly? Second, why hasn’t something been done? We have…
If abstraction is the key concept in virtualization, then you might wonder why it’s not been played in the market explicitly. It has, in multiple forms, but not in a way that linked explicitly to the abstraction concept. Now, though, Microsoft has launched Radius, a “cloud-native” application platform that abstracts the stuff it runs on,…
According to the song, “To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season turn, turn, turn….” That’s surely true for network operator service revenue opportunities, and one thing that all 88 of the operators I talked with this year have made that clear. The biggest problem, according to 57 of the operators is the “challenge…
If you want to raise profit per bit as a network operator, you have to raise revenues, lower costs, or both. For decades, operators enjoyed significant growth in mobile services and even good growth in wireline broadband, which gave them a cushion in terms of profit, but even during that period, profit per bit was…
Everyone believes that virtualization is important. I hear that from all 301 enterprises I’ve chatted with on the topic this year, and all 88 of the network operators. There are really no service providers or enterprises who I think aren’t committed to virtualization, and in multiple ways. It’s also a topic that most buyers (and…
What do enterprises want from their service providers? That’s a question that the service providers are focused on to the point of obsession, and one that’s aroused a lot of speculation among the service planners. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between what these planners are speculating on,…
We don’t seem to be able to shake the topic of cloud-native technology in the telco world. It’s also getting merged with what I think is a more general topic, which is “telco cloud”. As I noted in an earlier blog, I’ve been fiddling with the design of a digital-twinning “metaverse-of-things” software model, and it’s…
Vendors love to put out reports at this time of year, prepping for the new-year budget cycles. For network vendors, there’s the obligatory traffic hockey-stick commentary and an equally obligatory technology trends and product directions piece. Nokia offers this all in their Technology Strategy 2030 release, which includes a reference to their Global Network Traffic…
Over a year ago, I wrote a blog for Network World called “Why it makes sense for Broadcom to buy VMware”. I postulated that VMware might combine with Broadcom-based data center switches to build a bridge between cloud and data center. Suppose, just suppose, they did. What might that mean for the cloud? A lot,…