An industry is an ecosystem, a cooperative economic unit that shows its directions and signals its changes in many ways, through many channels. Today we have a set of signals that add up to something very interesting, very disturbing to many. Cisco reported their numbers, which the Street characterized as “solid” but with “disappointing guidance”. …
From the first, Juniper has had perhaps the strongest hardware technology of any network vendor. For a time, in the middle if the last decade, it also had some of the best marketing. Then things turned for Juniper. It brought in a CEO from Microsoft, a CEO who was supposed to take the company into…
OSS/BSS is part and parcel of the business of network operators, the way they manage their people, sell their services, bill and collect, plan…you get the picture. The question of how OSS/BSS will accommodate new stuff like SDN and NFV is thus critical, and anything critical generates a lot of comment. Anything that generates comment…
Juniper has followed the lead of competitors Brocade and Cisco in launching a virtual router product. Their press release on this was refreshingly entertaining, offering the announcement in the context of an example of what it might do. The only problem is that Juniper hasn’t really done anything more than either Cisco or Brocade in…
The thing about revolutions is that they’re…well…revolutionary. Out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new is a popular concept (especially if you’re not among the “old”). They’re exciting because the shake things up, create new media fodder, all sorts of good stuff. But they’re expensive and tiring, and so it’s hard to have more than one of them in the same market…
SDN and NFV have been media events for sure, like the cloud. But like the cloud, SDN and NFV are technology revolutions that require both the technology part (the right architectures and elements) and some revolutionaries. We’ve been sadly lacking in both, but that may now be changing. Two of the most credible of all…
Light Reading’s Carol Wilson did another nice interview this week, and documented it in a story about the progress and future of the ETSI NFV. A good part of the story focuses on the assertion that the ISG had to constrain its scope to get its work done. Respectfully, I disagree. Telecom is an industry…
Last week, and in prior blogs, I mentioned the fact that virtual network functions (VNFs) have to be recipients of NFV services, and that the sum of these services may determine the ease with which current network code could migrate to become VNFs. It’s also a determinant in the portability of VNFs across multiple platforms,…
We have some financial news from the industry today, and we can weave it with some of the technical topics that have been buzzing around to pose a question. How would SDN and NFV transform the competitive landscape? Will the business of networking, the vendors who drive it, be significantly impacted by these technologies? The…
A couple of you dropped me an email after my last blog and expressed an interest in hearing more about what I’d described as “functional” versus “structural” orchestration in NFV and even related technologies (SDN and the cloud). OK, here goes. If we start with the service example I gave in yesterday’s blog, we can…