Read the stories about the IT world and you can’t escape a couple of truths. One is that hardware is commoditizing; IBM sold its x86 business and everyone is talking commodity servers. Another truth a bit harder to pick out but no less real is that platforms in the broader sense are definitely coming into…
Alcatel-Lucent became the latest network equipment vendor to announce their numbers, and the company made some very helpful progress in its “Shift” program to reorient its efforts into areas like mobile and IP, where future profit growth could be hoped for. However, it didn’t have a breakout quarter, and that’s not unreasonable given the early…
Alcatel-Lucent became the latest network equipment vendor to announce their numbers, and the company made some very helpful progress in its “Shift” program to reorient its efforts into areas like mobile and IP, where future profit growth could be hoped for. However, it didn’t have a breakout quarter, and that’s not unreasonable given the early…
When Cisco proposed a policy-exchange protocol as a piece of OpenStack, it raised yet again the profile of the notion of policies as the solution to our network ills. Since then, I’ve had some pretty high-level people suggest that in the critical area of cloud, SDN, and NFV network evolution we could solve all our…
One of the (many) implicit contradictions in SDN, NFV, and even cloud deployment is the conflict between infrastructure capital cost and infrastructure TCO. The issues are created by a well-known truth, which is that it’s more expensive to make something work well than to just make it work. How much more? How good is “well?” …
Nokia, having completed its consolidation of the NSN partnership and sold off handsets to Microsoft, now faces the big question—“Where now?” The “New Nokia” seems to be a network equipment company, but it seems to me that if you look at Ericsson’s quarter you’re left with the realization that they might not have enough network…
Amdocs, the giant OSS/BSS provider, turned in a good quarter last week. Operations software is a long way from glamorous, but it’s also a long way from irrelevant—Amdocs’ quarter shows that. The relevance of OSS/BSS is one reason why it might play an important role in the evolution of service management and orchestration. The lack…
We always hear about the progress of new technologies, largely because “news” means “novelty” and there’s therefore little interest in how people are doing the same tired stuff they did yesterday. Unfortunately this tends to set up what I’ve called (yes, irreverently with respect to our friends in the Fourth Estate) a “Bulls**t bidding war”…
Just after yesterday’s Overture Networks announcement on an NFV platform, we now hear from Light Reading that Edgewater Networks has launched a project to develop an SDN/NFV position. Today, we also had a revised submission of the CloudNFV Proof-of-Concept to the ETSI NFV ISG. Alcatel-Lucent has been promoting its SDN and NFV position on the…
Any time somebody makes a networking announcement these days, they seem to enlist a Heavenly Choir to sing “SDN!” or “NFV! In the background. Most of the time, song is about all there is to the announcement. Yesterday, Overture Networks announced something for SDN and NFV without the choir, and in fact may have announced…