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…
When I did my review of the Street’s view of consolidation in the service provider space, some of you wondered about the network equipment vendors. After all, it’s hard to imagine how a buyer industry so pressed for profits it has to collapse into itself via consolidation could avoid putting some price pressure on its…
Cisco has never been shy about taking a different (and often frankly opportunistic) path with respect to “revolutions” like the cloud, SDN, and NFV. I’d be the last guy to say that Cisco was all for an open-happy-band-of-brothers approach to competition but I’d also be last to expect that they would be. We’re all in…
One of the inevitable results of commoditization is consolidation, and Wall Street (Oppenheimer in particular) has started predicting who among the “providers” in telecom might be acquired by somebody else. It’s worth looking at their list of eaters and “eatees” to see what we can learn about industry direction. Top of everyone’s list is T-Mobile,…
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that Huawei turned in record earnings in the last quarter, and I’m sure that the other network vendors have even more to worry about now than before. So do network operators, whose own revenue and profit pressures have been driving them to reduce costs. Nobody in the whole of…
There have been a number of commitments by network operators to new technologies like the cloud, SDN, and NFV. Last week, Metaswitch earned its carrier stripes with a win in Europe, one of the first (of many, I’m sure) non-traditional IMS deployments. Their stuff has been used in at least one NFV PoC. Verizon and…
Well, it’s Friday and a good time to piece together some news items for the week, things that by themselves may not be a revolution but that could be combined to signal something important. An opening point is that Oracle’s Industry Connect event, which proves that Oracle does in fact see the communications industry as…
Everyone knows that operators and enterprises want more service automation. Some classes of business users say that fixing mistakes accounts for half their total network and IT TCO, in fact. Nobody doubts that you need something to do the automating, meaning that software tools are going to have to take control of lifecycle management. A…
We’re obviously not going to get to the network of the future by having some pretty genie wiggle her nose to create an instant transformation. No matter how radical things like the cloud, SDN, and NFV might be in the end-game, they’re going to get to that point one small step at a time. Most…