I’ve been on a couple trips recently that featured, at some point or the other, the classical multi-armed signpost telling me how far I was from New York, Beijing, Rio, or whatever. And, while there’s never been a road junction at one of these signs that could take me to all the destinations, you can…
Well, it’s 2014 and so it’s a good time to match up the looking-ahead and looking-back parts of analyzing our industry. One good way to do that is to look at how the network vendors’ stocks have fared in the last year. If you go to any of the financial sites and run…
I’ve looked at the vendor side of network transformation in a couple of recent blogs, focusing on interpreting Wall Street views of how the seller side of our industry will fare. It may be fitting that my blog for the last day of 2013 focuses on what’s arguably the clearest buyer-side statement that something needs…
I’ve blogged in the past on how the Street views various companies or even the networking industry, and today there’s been an interesting report by equity research firm Cowan and Company about how SDN and NFV will impact the market. This is the outcome of the company’s Trend-Spotting Conference and it includes some industry panel…
We hear all the time about how new technologies like the cloud, SDN, and NFV are poised for “hockey-stick” growth. Most of the time that’s not true, of course. In an industry with three to eight-year capital cycles it’s pretty darn hard for something to achieve really explosive growth because of the dampening impact of…
It’s pretty clear to me from comments I’ve gotten in my blog that there are a lot of questions out there on the topic of management or operations. When we talk about things like SDN and NFV we can talk about management practices in a general way, but we can really only talk “operations” if…
Generally, the realities of online journalism will tend to exaggerate everything. A development, to be press-worthy, has to be either the single-handed savior of Western Culture, or the last bastion of International Communism. NFV has gone through this gamut, and it seems like a lot of the recent stories are skeptical if not negative. My…
This is always the time of year when you’re supposed to look into the crystal ball and talk about the near-term future. OK, one of the areas we need to be watching in 2014 is metro. I’ve noted in prior blogs that metro-area networks are critical because the majority of profitable traffic both originates and…
There have been some LinkedIn discussions regarding my blog on Juniper’s Wandl buy, and some comments have opened the broader question of whether policy management and path computation might be a factor in the deal, even to the point where they might be incorporated into Juniper’s Contrail SDN controller as a result of the buy. …
Oracle’s numbers came out, and they were good after a run of misses. One of the obvious questions raised by Oracle’s success is whether it’s Oracle’s success or a sign of secular recovery in software or in tech. Let’s look at some of the signals to find out. This tends to be Oracle’s best quarter;…