NFV is all about hosting virtual functions, and justifying it means that the process of hosting functions is somehow better than creating network services by interconnecting fixed devices and custom appliances. The question is whether that’s true, and it’s a question that’s becoming increasingly important to service provider executives who have to decide whether to…
It’s hard not to see the VMworld show as anything other than a VMware-versus-Cisco extravaganza, partly of course because that’s how it tends to be portrayed in coverage. Underneath, there is surely good reason to see the networking developments in particular as being contra-Cisco, but I wonder whether there’s more to it. Cisco might be…
Amazon isn’t just your mother’s online retailer anymore, obviously. The company has evolved through its position as an ebook provider and public cloud provider, into a video and online music streamer, and now it’s looking at gaming and advertising. Could all of this revolutionize the OTT market? Certainly it could revolutionize Google, but the OTT…
There’s a popular view that as we move into the future, operators will build networks from commodity/commercial off-the-shelf servers (COTS) rather than specialized network equipment. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the poster child for the notion, and there have been a flood of announcements from vendors who have made hosted network functionality available under the…
Most of our discussions of the competitive landscape in networking involve the larger firms; Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper, and NSN. While it’s true these firms have the most influence and the greatest resources, they also have a powerful incentive to take root in the current market and become trees. Mammals may be smaller, but…
HP reported its results and the numbers were favorable overall, with the company delivering year-over-year revenue growth for the first time in three years. The only fly in this sweet ointment was that the great majority of the gains came in the PC division, which saw a 12% increase in revenue that management attributes to…
Yesterday I talked about the views of a particular operator on NFV trials and evolution, based on a conversation with a very knowledgeable tech guru there. That same guru is heavily involved in SDN evolution and it’s worthwhile to explore the operator’s SDN progress and directions. A good place to start is with the focus…
I had an interesting discussion late last week with a true thought leader in the service provider networking space. Not a VP but a senior technical person, this individual is involved in a wide range of both SDN and NFV activities for his company, and also involved with other operators in their own efforts. It…
Networking has, for decades, seemed to advance based on changes in how we do stuff. We progressed from TDM to packet, from SNA to IP in business networks, and now we’re moving (so they say) from legacy IP and Ethernet to SDN and NFV and from electrical to optical. Underneath this seeming consistency is an…
Yesterday, in the wake of earnings calls from both Cisco and IBM, I blogged that IBM was at least working to build fundamental demand for its stuff by engaging with Apple to enhance mobile productivity for enterprises. I then commented that the challenge would be in converting this kind of relationship into some structured “middleware”…