There was a time when “synergies” were a big thing in tech. The notion of a company as a one-stop shop was considered to be both a plus from a sales efficiency perspective and a means of creating pull-through by artfully constructing feature lists on loosely related products. No more, apparently. The Street has been…
The Open Platform for NFV initiative appears to be getting up steam, with the support of vendors and network operators alike. I’m a long-standing fan of open-source software and a specific advocate of it in the NFV space (see my ExperiaSphere project), but while there are some hopeful signs in OPNFV so far I’m still…
Apple announced its iWatch yesterday, and it’s likely to become an icon among the hip crowd, among which I’m unhesitatingly not counting myself. But notwithstanding the forces that drive Apple addicts to buy everything under that famous logo, useful or not, iWatch does open some interesting questions and suggest some interesting trends. So while I’m…
I had a couple of very interesting discussions recently on SDN, and they point out what I think might be the emerging key issue for the whole concept. That issue is whether SDN is about services or about protocols, and it’s been framed to me recently by discussions on the evolution of OpenDaylight. The central…
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…