Some of my readers likely think I spend too much time on business issues in networking, preferring that I talk about revolutionary technology. Well, if the Founding Fathers had been stranded on a desert island through the late 1700s all their revolutionary precepts would have done is inspire birds, fish, and maybe turtles. Revolutions depend…
This is another one of those days when you have a bunch of news items that reflect a common theme. What do Yahoo, OpenCompute, and AT&T have in common? They’re all about the business of networking. Yahoo reported another quarter of disappointment, which frankly should never have been a surprise given that there was nothing…
Apple reported its numbers yesterday, and they showed what might have been a surprise for Apple fans, was surely a disappointment for the Street, and things that I’d been concerned about for quite a while. In short, Apple’s message is that “It isn’t easy to be cool, and coolness isn’t very durable either!” Apple’s three…
In October of 2012, an insightful group of network operators published the “Call for Action” that launched Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). I responded to that call with some suggestions, among which was a recommendation that a prototype be developed as soon as possible. Operators encouraged me to do that, and a project group came together…
I’ve criticized Cisco often for making statements more calculated to generate PR than to provide any insight about the conditions in the networking space. Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior has been at least as guilty as any other Cisco exec in this regard, but I recently saw a quote from her that makes some sense. The…
We had a lot of news yesterday, news that I’m going to assert all adds up to cloud-driven change. To open this blog (since I’m a networking guy after all) I want to start with Juniper. The company had a decent quarter and while it’s guidance was cautious, the initial reaction of the market to…
Earnings are probably a dull topic to many who read my blog, but they are vitally important in understanding tech revolutions and evolutions. Nothing happens in tech unless someone with credibility sells a product to a buyer, and earnings are a good measure of how that’s going for the key players. Today I want to…
One of the imponderables about the future of networking is how it’s going to be paid for. Nobody is going to invest in a network without ample return, which in financial terms means an ROI that’s at least equal to the investor’s current internal rate of return. There’s a lot of pressure to “boost benefits”…
I’m very pleased to report that I’ve been notified by the TM Forum that the CloudNFV Catalyst proposal we submitted for the June Nice conference has been approved. This Catalyst is aimed at demonstrating that TMF principles (GB922 and GB942) can be used to guide not only the deployment of virtual functions but also their…
As we advance toward IBM’s earnings call on January 21st, and with additional news now out that IBM is again trying to sell off its x86 server business, it’s clear that we’re heading for one of those watershed moments. I’ve been associated with IBM products in some way for almost fifty years now, and watched…