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…
We’re getting a lot of NFV commentary out of the World Congress event this week, and some of it represents NFV positioning. Most network and IT vendors have defined at least a proto-plan for NFV at this point, but a few are just starting to articulate their positions. One is Juniper, whose reputation as a…
Often in our industry, a new technology gets linked with an implementation or approach and the link is so tight it constrains further evolution, even sometimes reducing utility. This may have been the case with cloud computing and NFV, which have been bound from the first to the notion of harnessing units of compute power…
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…