There’s a report circulating that Cisco’s long-time, charismatic, and some-say too-long-standing CEO John Chambers may be stepping down this fall. Financial sources seem generally pleased with the notion, given that Cisco’s stock seems to be “range-bound”, offering little opportunity for either regular “long” investors or short-sellers. There’s little question that Cisco is mired in something,…
Brocade and Overture Show How SDN/NFV Evolution Might Look
Yesterday I talked about the “union” of implementations of the cloud, SDN, and NFV revolutions. My key point was that this implementation would inevitably converge because there won’t be three future infrastructures, but only one. A corollary to that point is that however vendors start their own path to this converged future, they’ll close ranks…
HP and the Union of Revolutions
It’s interesting to me that we’re starting to see focus on the key issues of the cloud, SDN, and NFV but not necessarily the kind of focus you’d expect. To me, and to the enterprises and operators I survey, there is a clear need for some unifying vision because there is simply no appetite for…
We’re Almost Home on ExperiaSphere!
Our first (high-level) tutorial on the open-source universal MANO architecture we’ve called ExperiaSphere(TM) will be published the end of June, and you can find out more about this on our ExperiaSphere blog. We’re also moving our support for ExperiaSphere questions and answers from LinkedIn (where we’ve had group posting issues) to Google+, where we have…
Is New Public High-Flyer Arista a Threat to Cisco?
Arista Networks had a very successful IPO last week, something that’s sure to raise the hopes of VCs and startups in the networking and SDN space. Underneath, of course, are all of the usual questions—most significantly whether the strong showing in the stock can survive months of trading and the eventual release of restricted shares. …
Why Analytics Alone isn’t Power
Everyone knows that knowledge is power, but information is not “knowledge”, and that’s the general issue I have with the big data and analytics craze. We’re presuming that collecting a whole lot of stuff is valuable, which could be true…if we can do something useful with what we collect. In the areas of SDN and…
Firming Up the Foundation of the Tech Revolution
Tech has always been a kind of swirling mix of trends (and hype), but any ecosystem necessarily supports symbiotic things best—positive feedback is after all “positive”. We may be seeing some signs of symbiosis in some of the trends in IT and networking, and so we may be poised for better-than-average rates of change in…
Can We Say “Open Source” and “MANO” in One Breath?
The TMF event in Nice this week is a focus for an important issue in the evolution of networking, which is the way in which existing network and operations elements relate to newly introduced technologies like SDN and NFV. The Forum promoted its “ZOOM” project, which is aimed at modernizing OSS/BSS models and introducing (hence…
How Mobile-Model Changes Could Impact SDN and NFV
Mary Meeker is probably best known for her role as advocate-in-chief of the dotcom bubble, but she’s produced some respectable research since then, and her latest has some interesting points, particularly when considered in light of SDN and NFV evolution. In fact, she suggests that there may be an emerging set of missions for both…
The Net on Cisco’s Numbers: It’s Time to Think Above UCS
Cisco reported their numbers last night, and while their results were better than expected, they showed both a drop in profits and in revenues. That’s not the kind of indication that Cisco likes, and so it was pretty certain that Chambers would be raising the hope of change. In the call, his “keynote” statement was:…