When Cisco proposed a policy-exchange protocol as a piece of OpenStack, it raised yet again the profile of the notion of policies as the solution to our network ills. Since then, I’ve had some pretty high-level people suggest that in the critical area of cloud, SDN, and NFV network evolution we could solve all our…
One of the (many) implicit contradictions in SDN, NFV, and even cloud deployment is the conflict between infrastructure capital cost and infrastructure TCO. The issues are created by a well-known truth, which is that it’s more expensive to make something work well than to just make it work. How much more? How good is “well?” …
Nokia, having completed its consolidation of the NSN partnership and sold off handsets to Microsoft, now faces the big question—“Where now?” The “New Nokia” seems to be a network equipment company, but it seems to me that if you look at Ericsson’s quarter you’re left with the realization that they might not have enough network…
Amdocs, the giant OSS/BSS provider, turned in a good quarter last week. Operations software is a long way from glamorous, but it’s also a long way from irrelevant—Amdocs’ quarter shows that. The relevance of OSS/BSS is one reason why it might play an important role in the evolution of service management and orchestration. The lack…
We always hear about the progress of new technologies, largely because “news” means “novelty” and there’s therefore little interest in how people are doing the same tired stuff they did yesterday. Unfortunately this tends to set up what I’ve called (yes, irreverently with respect to our friends in the Fourth Estate) a “Bulls**t bidding war”…
Just after yesterday’s Overture Networks announcement on an NFV platform, we now hear from Light Reading that Edgewater Networks has launched a project to develop an SDN/NFV position. Today, we also had a revised submission of the CloudNFV Proof-of-Concept to the ETSI NFV ISG. Alcatel-Lucent has been promoting its SDN and NFV position on the…
Any time somebody makes a networking announcement these days, they seem to enlist a Heavenly Choir to sing “SDN!” or “NFV! In the background. Most of the time, song is about all there is to the announcement. Yesterday, Overture Networks announced something for SDN and NFV without the choir, and in fact may have announced…
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…