“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…
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,…