I mentioned in my blog yesterday that there was a distinct difference between “service management” and “resource management” in networks, and it’s worth taking some time to explore this because it impacts both SDN and NFV. In fact, this difference may be at the heart of the whole notion of management transformation, the argument on…
I’ve talked in previous blogs about the value of a top-down approach to things like NFV, and I don’t want to appear to be throwing stones without offering a constructive example. What I therefore propose to do now is to look at NFV in a top-down way, the way I contend a software architect would…
The need to modernize operations practices to make them more agile and efficient is pretty obvious. The need to organize complex software deployments, particularly those involving componentized applications, is also obvious. So is the need to do efficient allocation of features and components to virtualized infrastructure. What is not yet obvious is just how to…
I noted yesterday that HP’s decision to break itself into two companies would likely increase pressure on Cisco to fragment as well, pressure that began more than a decade ago. Even then, the Street saw that switching and routing were low-growth businesses, which meant they’d tend to tie better product segments to the ground and…
There was a time when “synergies” were a big thing in tech. The notion of a company as a one-stop shop was considered to be both a plus from a sales efficiency perspective and a means of creating pull-through by artfully constructing feature lists on loosely related products. No more, apparently. The Street has been…
The Open Platform for NFV initiative appears to be getting up steam, with the support of vendors and network operators alike. I’m a long-standing fan of open-source software and a specific advocate of it in the NFV space (see my ExperiaSphere project), but while there are some hopeful signs in OPNFV so far I’m still…
Apple announced its iWatch yesterday, and it’s likely to become an icon among the hip crowd, among which I’m unhesitatingly not counting myself. But notwithstanding the forces that drive Apple addicts to buy everything under that famous logo, useful or not, iWatch does open some interesting questions and suggest some interesting trends. So while I’m…
I had a couple of very interesting discussions recently on SDN, and they point out what I think might be the emerging key issue for the whole concept. That issue is whether SDN is about services or about protocols, and it’s been framed to me recently by discussions on the evolution of OpenDaylight. The central…
One of the most interesting players in the NFV game is HP. Not only do they have a strong position in IT, the cloud, and the data center, they also have a strong OSS/BSS position and they’re prominent in all of the standards groups involved in network evolution. That includes NFV, of course, but also…
Cisco has long been an advocate of what I like to call “Chicken-Little” marketing; you run around yelling that the traffic sky is falling and expect operators to accept sub-par ROIs to do their part in addressing the issue. Their “Internet of Everything” story has always had elements of that angle, but it’s also been…