Anyone who believes in “cyclical spending” or “refresh cycles” or “secular recovery” in tech should take another look at the numbers after both Cisco and IBM reported yesterday. We are obviously in a general economic recovery and yet tech is stagnant. As it happens, though, the same two companies’ reports offer some insights into what…
Despite the fact that every vendor, editor, and reporter likely thinks that media attention to a concept should be sufficient to drive hockey-stick deployment, in the real world a bit more is needed. One of the major challenges that all of our current technology revolutions—the cloud, SDN, and NFV—all have is that of operations cost…
I’ve done a couple of blogs on SDN topics, but one of the important questions facing everyone who’s considering SDN is how it would fit in the context of NFV. For network operators, NFV may well be the senior partner issue-wise, since NFV is explicitly aimed at improving capital efficiency, service agility, and operations efficiency…
The deal between Arista and VMware may turn out to be one of the pivotal developments in SDN, and one of the pivotal steps in the evolution of networking. Just how far it will take us is, at this point, not clear because there’s the usual mixture of issues, both tactical and strategic to consider. …
We are obviously a long way from exploiting the full potential of our revolutionary network technologies. Years into SDN evolution we still can’t build a global network with it, for example. Part of the reason is that we’ve not attacked the notion holistically. I want to continue my exploration of “lessons learned” with respect to…
The Service Architect Lifecycle tutorial I just completed for ExperiaSphere taught me a lot about management and orchestration for SDN, NFV, and the cloud. There’s nothing like having to explain how something would be used to focus your attention on what needs to be done! I don’t want to dive into all the issues, which…
The most fundamental question that we in networking faced is not whether we’ll see a transformation of the network, but what form that transformation will take. As I suggested yesterday in my blog, fundamental changes in what a network delivers to its customers will always require changes in how the network operates. We’re seeing those…
Sometimes it seems like companies miss the simplest truths. A market, over time, has to either change or stay the same, right? Why then do we seem to have a problem accepting that in the networking space? We presume change and static markets, seemingly, at the same time. Juniper’s recent quarter, and the steps the…
I’ve commented in prior blogs that the output of what we call “SDN” or “NFV” would, in a functional sense, but a kind of network-as-a-service or NaaS. NaaS implies that services are created through some API process (the service API) rather than being simply in place as an attribute of cooperative device behaviors. Since you…
IBM and Google both reported their quarterly numbers, with both companies beating on the revenue line but short on profits. The markets this morning took disconnected view; IBM’s shares were off pre-market and Google was up, though both movements were modest. Google’s revenues beat slightly, with decent guidance, and this is probably what the Street…