Cisco isn’t the largest networking company, but they’re likely the most famous. They’re associated with the IP revolution, the Internet, and the way that a little company can suddenly become a giant and make a lot of people rich along the way. “Be the next Cisco” entered the lexicon of startup success, in fact. So…
The future of networking is being defined literally as we speak, but not by the companies who’d like to define it, or even the ones we’d think would be doing the defining. We’re seeing a passing of innovation from the traditional network players to the OTT players, and from traditional network vendors to a collection…
One of the people who read my blog sent me an email last week, asking why network operators listed operations efficiency, service agility, and capex reduction as their drivers for SDN and NFV and not “new services”. It’s a good question, insightful because in fact only about 10% of operators in my survey indicated they…
Anyone who’s watching the networking market realizes by now that there’s a huge interest in open-source, especially among service providers. Many attribute this to penny-pinching, but that’s not the case. Operators know that moving from appliances to hosted elements is going to save less than 20% on their capital budget and have a so-far-unpredictable impact…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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. …
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…