Most of our discussions of the competitive landscape in networking involve the larger firms; Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper, and NSN. While it’s true these firms have the most influence and the greatest resources, they also have a powerful incentive to take root in the current market and become trees. Mammals may be smaller, but…
HP reported its results and the numbers were favorable overall, with the company delivering year-over-year revenue growth for the first time in three years. The only fly in this sweet ointment was that the great majority of the gains came in the PC division, which saw a 12% increase in revenue that management attributes to…
Yesterday I talked about the views of a particular operator on NFV trials and evolution, based on a conversation with a very knowledgeable tech guru there. That same guru is heavily involved in SDN evolution and it’s worthwhile to explore the operator’s SDN progress and directions. A good place to start is with the focus…
I had an interesting discussion late last week with a true thought leader in the service provider networking space. Not a VP but a senior technical person, this individual is involved in a wide range of both SDN and NFV activities for his company, and also involved with other operators in their own efforts. It…
Networking has, for decades, seemed to advance based on changes in how we do stuff. We progressed from TDM to packet, from SNA to IP in business networks, and now we’re moving (so they say) from legacy IP and Ethernet to SDN and NFV and from electrical to optical. Underneath this seeming consistency is an…
Yesterday, in the wake of earnings calls from both Cisco and IBM, I blogged that IBM was at least working to build fundamental demand for its stuff by engaging with Apple to enhance mobile productivity for enterprises. I then commented that the challenge would be in converting this kind of relationship into some structured “middleware”…
Anyone who believes in “cyclical spending” or “refresh cycles” or “secular recovery” in tech should take another look at the numbers after both Cisco and IBM reported yesterday. We are obviously in a general economic recovery and yet tech is stagnant. As it happens, though, the same two companies’ reports offer some insights into what…
Despite the fact that every vendor, editor, and reporter likely thinks that media attention to a concept should be sufficient to drive hockey-stick deployment, in the real world a bit more is needed. One of the major challenges that all of our current technology revolutions—the cloud, SDN, and NFV—all have is that of operations cost…
I’ve done a couple of blogs on SDN topics, but one of the important questions facing everyone who’s considering SDN is how it would fit in the context of NFV. For network operators, NFV may well be the senior partner issue-wise, since NFV is explicitly aimed at improving capital efficiency, service agility, and operations efficiency…
The deal between Arista and VMware may turn out to be one of the pivotal developments in SDN, and one of the pivotal steps in the evolution of networking. Just how far it will take us is, at this point, not clear because there’s the usual mixture of issues, both tactical and strategic to consider. …