You’ve all probably heard about (if not read) the “Tale of Two Cities”, a story that in part emphasizes life as a tension between two poles. Guess what? We have that in NFV, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Yesterday, I got a copy of the interim report for one…
Credit Suisse has some interesting data on the data center switching market, and I think it’s particularly interesting when you look at in light of the overall weakness in IT spending that Gartner previously reported. It also raises some points about SDN evolution and what can be expected there. First, the data center is the…
Gartner released some IT data it will be discussing further in a financial analyst conference next week. The information suggests that IT spending is growing more slowly than previously estimated, and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that software growth is well ahead of hardware growth. The company says that “Price pressure based on…
We continue to have a lot of discussion around the use of open-source technology by network operators in NFV and SDN applications. Obviously, the majority of the SDN spectrum is already covered by open source (OpenDaylight for example) and there’s no shortage of open source in NFV either, with OpenStack, Linux, and so forth. Why…
Public policy is often set in the courts, and we have both a current and an impending example of court action on our networking industry. As is always the case, the issues may be decided in law but not necessarily in the eyes of those with interest in the matters. The Supreme Court dealt what…
The “Internet of Things” is one of those concepts that starts with at least a grain of truth and gets enveloped in the inevitable wave of hype. We seem, as an industry, to be incapable of addressing anything that’s not characterized by a hockey stick growth estimate and an ever-expanding-and-less-precise definition. The problem is that…
There’s been a lot of news recently about “security” or “governance” in the cloud, SDN, or NFV. It’s certainly fair to ask how new technologies are going to support long-standing requirements in these areas, but I wonder whether we’re not imposing not only old practices but old rules on a set of very new technologies,…
We hear this morning that Oracle is going to buy Micros Systems, a primary provider of software to retail/hospitality users. What should we think? Well, everyone knows the “Law of Large Numbers”, and most know that the term is applied to so many things it’s fair to say there’s a “large number” of the laws. …
Oracle reported their quarterly numbers, and they’re always a good player to analyze to understand market trends and issues. Oracle is like IBM in that both companies are respected incumbents with a very strong sales-versus-marketing bias in their way of doing business. They’re unlike IBM in that they have a much stronger software bend and…
I blogged just yesterday about the possibility that the competitive dynamic in the orchestration space would be changed by Cisco’s Tail-f deal. Since then we’ve had another announcement in the space, this one from Wind River. The company’s NFV approach has a lot of good about it, a singular issue I’d like to see them…