For months I’ve been following the evolution of HP’s NFV strategy. I’m happy to say that on December 2nd and 3rd I’ll be attending the HP Discover 2014 event in Barcelona for an even deeper dive. While there I’m part of a panel entitled “The New Business of the Network: Network Functions Virtualization” (9:30 AM…
If we still had typewriters these days, I’d bet that the typewriter vendors would be claiming support for NFV because they put “N”, “F”, and “V” keys on their keyboards. A few might even add an extra “V” key (we have “VNFs” in “NFV” implementations, and call what they do “advanced NFV support”. It’s no…
Cisco has for years been two companies—one that generated most of the revenue but was focused on the clearly threatened switching/routing space, and another that aimed at high-flying and largely unproven opportunities in “emerging technologies”. The difference has been stark enough that Street activists have called for a breakup of Cisco so the speculative urges…
Of all the components called out in the ETSI NFV E2E architecture, it may be that the most important is the VNF Manager or VNFM. As the dialog on NFV advanced, there’s been a shift of benefit focus from savings in capex to improvements in operations efficiency and service agility. In addition, the reliability, availability,…
Alcatel-Lucent announced last week that it was getting into the virtual router business, and at the same time announced an evolution to their Nuage SDN platform strategy. The Nuage stuff it good; some of what they did is what Alcatel-Lucent and others should have done from the first with SDN. Some of it also creates…
The media is all agog over the decision by the President to endorse a path to neutrality that would include reclassifying ISP services as Title II, meaning making the ISPs common carriers in terms of the Telecom Act. I’ve read that it means the ISPs would become public utilities, or that they’d then have to…
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…