I’ve blogged quite a bit about management and orchestration and the management challenges of next-gen services. Connection services are largely defined by their management challenges, since they connect users and experiences rather than creating features themselves. When we look at more advanced services, leading up to the cloud and SaaS, it’s a different matter. For…
We live in an age of virtualization, abstraction. We’re facing an onrush of changes in our basic technology platforms driven by the cloud, by SDN, by NFV. We’re told that these new technical options are more, or maybe less, secure. According to my fall survey of users, nearly 90% of businesses said that they felt…
We in tech are clearly an industry in transition. How’s it going? That’s a question important to all, and at the same time hard to answer. Our only hope of tracking progress is to look at some companies who represent clear paradigm shifts and see if the paradigms are…well…shifting. Let’s try that today. Amazon reported…
“Got a good reason for taking the easy way out” is a good old song, and it’s also a pretty good theme on which to hang the analysis of a couple of news items. Apple had an OK quarter but the financial sector thinks it’s coming to an end of the easy money period. The…
Juniper reported their numbers yesterday, and so did one of Juniper’s key clients, AT&T. Just a day before, AT&T had announced that Juniper (and Amdocs) were added to AT&T’s “User-Defined Network Cloud”. Now, some contrasts between the two companies’ reports create a worthy topic for analysis. When you read through Street analysis on AT&T, it’s…
One of the issues I’ve gotten concerned about regarding NFV is the openness of a vendor’s NFV architecture. The NFV ISG clearly intends to have a high level of interoperability across NFV elements and solutions, but there are some factors that are hampering a realization of that goal. Most of these aren’t being discussed, so…
We’re starting to get some earnings reports from tech bellwethers now, and so it’s time to take a reading of the space and try to assess how tech might develop through the balance of 2014. We’re still early in the game, particularly for networking, but we do have some insights from the IT hardware side…
You have to love a market that, when faced with seemingly insurmountable contradictions in business and technology trends, proceeds to generate new ones unapologetically. We had that yesterday with the story that Sprint was considering shutting down the WIMAX assets of Clearwire, then another story that Google might be aiming to be an MVNO. So…
We’re hearing a lot about how analytics is going to change networking, how they’re essential in SDN, NFV, the cloud, and maybe also critical in improving your social standing, good looks, financial health, even maybe make you run faster. How big can “big data” get? Apparently the sky’s the limit. As usual, most of this…
I’ve talked about the fortunes of the service providers and the network equipment vendors in past blogs, and so it’s logical now to talk about the IT giants who are players in the networking space. None of these firms are likely to be targets of M&A in at least the traditional sense, and Dell has…