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…
We’re obviously in a period of transformation for computing and networking, and it’s equally obvious that HP is intent on improving its position in the market through this transition. They’ve made two recent announcements that illustrate what their strategy could be, and it could mean some interesting dynamics in both computing and networking over the…
It used to be that trade shows were the best place to make new announcements because the media was all there, presumably captivated by the potential of all those vendors and products. Lately the opposite has been true; there are simply too many voices shouting to be heard and prospects get clickitis from even trying…
One of the “in-passing” comments made by John Chambers in Cisco’s earnings call was that the company was “We are pulling away from our competitors and leading in both the SDN thought leadership and customer implementations.” Interestingly there’s a strong element of truth in that statement despite the fact that Cisco is widely regarded as…
A recent research report continued on a theme that’s become a bit of a cloud computing mantra—we’re exiting the “early adopter” phase of the cloud and heading into the main event. In some sense this is true, because we are certainly in the “early” phase of the cloud. In another sense it’s misleading because almost…
There’s some good news on NFV, which I’m happy to be able to report since good news (other than hype) is hard to come by these days. I reported early this year that operators’ CFOs had told me in the spring of 2014 that they were so far unable to make a conclusive business case…
In recent blogs I’ve been arguing that we’re focusing too much on the technology of new services and not about the actual opportunity. There are scads of technological suggestions on where new revenue can be located, but where do you find opportunity? That’s a question that’s always being asked by anyone who sells anything, including…