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…
I’ve been blogging about the fact that the Internet’s pricing model has been undermining the revenue potential for “connection services”. If you can’t charge incrementally for bits, then there’s less value in investing to generate them. One thing this has meant for the industry is pressure on network equipment vendors; operators don’t want buy as…
Some time ago, the Linux Foundation in cooperation with the NFV ISG launched an initiative (Open Platform for NFV, or OPN) aimed at implementing the NFV specifications. OpenStack has now launched a “Team” that has the same goals. It’s not unusual for multiple groups to aim at the same target these days, both in standards…
There’s been a lot of talk about “layers” in SDN and even in NFV, and I’ve blogged in the past that most of it is at the minimum inconsistent with real OSI model principles. Some is just nonsense. Interestingly, given that we seem to want to invent layer behaviors ad hoc, we’re ignoring a real…
One of the things about hot trends that my surveys tell me frustrates users is the tendency to talk about something but never really define it properly or explain how it would work. We’ve all seen that with things like SDN and NFV. It doesn’t have to be one of the super-revolution trends either; I’ve…
NFV is all about hosting virtual functions, and justifying it means that the process of hosting functions is somehow better than creating network services by interconnecting fixed devices and custom appliances. The question is whether that’s true, and it’s a question that’s becoming increasingly important to service provider executives who have to decide whether to…
It’s hard not to see the VMworld show as anything other than a VMware-versus-Cisco extravaganza, partly of course because that’s how it tends to be portrayed in coverage. Underneath, there is surely good reason to see the networking developments in particular as being contra-Cisco, but I wonder whether there’s more to it. Cisco might be…
Amazon isn’t just your mother’s online retailer anymore, obviously. The company has evolved through its position as an ebook provider and public cloud provider, into a video and online music streamer, and now it’s looking at gaming and advertising. Could all of this revolutionize the OTT market? Certainly it could revolutionize Google, but the OTT…
There’s a popular view that as we move into the future, operators will build networks from commodity/commercial off-the-shelf servers (COTS) rather than specialized network equipment. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the poster child for the notion, and there have been a flood of announcements from vendors who have made hosted network functionality available under the…