Public policy is often set in the courts, and we have both a current and an impending example of court action on our networking industry. As is always the case, the issues may be decided in law but not necessarily in the eyes of those with interest in the matters. The Supreme Court dealt what…
The “Internet of Things” is one of those concepts that starts with at least a grain of truth and gets enveloped in the inevitable wave of hype. We seem, as an industry, to be incapable of addressing anything that’s not characterized by a hockey stick growth estimate and an ever-expanding-and-less-precise definition. The problem is that…
There’s been a lot of news recently about “security” or “governance” in the cloud, SDN, or NFV. It’s certainly fair to ask how new technologies are going to support long-standing requirements in these areas, but I wonder whether we’re not imposing not only old practices but old rules on a set of very new technologies,…
We hear this morning that Oracle is going to buy Micros Systems, a primary provider of software to retail/hospitality users. What should we think? Well, everyone knows the “Law of Large Numbers”, and most know that the term is applied to so many things it’s fair to say there’s a “large number” of the laws. …
Oracle reported their quarterly numbers, and they’re always a good player to analyze to understand market trends and issues. Oracle is like IBM in that both companies are respected incumbents with a very strong sales-versus-marketing bias in their way of doing business. They’re unlike IBM in that they have a much stronger software bend and…
I blogged just yesterday about the possibility that the competitive dynamic in the orchestration space would be changed by Cisco’s Tail-f deal. Since then we’ve had another announcement in the space, this one from Wind River. The company’s NFV approach has a lot of good about it, a singular issue I’d like to see them…
Cisco isn’t the largest networking company, but they’re likely the most famous. They’re associated with the IP revolution, the Internet, and the way that a little company can suddenly become a giant and make a lot of people rich along the way. “Be the next Cisco” entered the lexicon of startup success, in fact. So…
The future of networking is being defined literally as we speak, but not by the companies who’d like to define it, or even the ones we’d think would be doing the defining. We’re seeing a passing of innovation from the traditional network players to the OTT players, and from traditional network vendors to a collection…
One of the people who read my blog sent me an email last week, asking why network operators listed operations efficiency, service agility, and capex reduction as their drivers for SDN and NFV and not “new services”. It’s a good question, insightful because in fact only about 10% of operators in my survey indicated they…
Anyone who’s watching the networking market realizes by now that there’s a huge interest in open-source, especially among service providers. Many attribute this to penny-pinching, but that’s not the case. Operators know that moving from appliances to hosted elements is going to save less than 20% on their capital budget and have a so-far-unpredictable impact…