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…
I’ve been blogging that the SDN and NFV evolution we’ve been engaged with had been approached top-down instead of the other way around, things would have been different. I offered a quick view of what top-down NFV might have looked like. Of course, I know as well as you all that we can’t roll back…
I’ve talked a lot about the importance of NFV to the industry at large, and about the fact that management/orchestration (MANO) is the heart of NFV. As the term itself suggests, MANO is the fusion of two interdependent processes that also happen to be phases in a service lifecycle. To most involved in NFV, the…
Juniper had their earnings call yesterday, and the refrain was hardly unexpected given general market trends and Juniper’s recent earnings calls. CEO Shaygan Kheradpir started by saying that the company had made significant progress and the disappointing results were due to “industry headwinds”. That may be different words than the last Juniper CEO used to…
The relationship between Cisco, VMware, and EMC has been a great source of sound bites in the last year or so. When EMC and Cisco partnered to create VCE, a kind of orphan acronym that likely stands for “Virtual Cloud Environment” but which the VCE “About” page fails to define, there was speculation that the…
VMware reported its quarter, and while the company beat expectations overall, the report still raises several questions and doesn’t answer some of the bigger holdovers. I’ve been talking about the “Novell effect” in prior blogs, and it’s obvious that VMware faces the risk of simply saturating its market. While there are exits from that risk…
Today we had the interesting combination of Apple and Verizon quarterly reports, and it’s worth looking at the two in synchrony because of the (obvious, we hope) linkage between the service provider space and the premier provider of consumer mobile technology. There is in fact likely a bit more synchrony than you’d think. Verizon slightly…
According to one of the financial pundits, “IBM needs revenue growth.” Forgive me, but that’s not going to win any profundity ribbons, gang. Every public company needs revenue growth unless it wants its stock to decline at some point. Recognizing that is probably less useful than recognizing a blue sky on a clear day. What…
SDN and NFV are revolutions in a sense, at least. They both offer a radical new way of looking at traditional network infrastructure, and that means that were they to deploy to their full potential they could change not only how we build networks, but what vendors make money on the deployments. A lot of…