Hardware, whether network or IT, is commoditizing in the view of most in the industry and on Wall Street. Software licenses now make up less than a quarter of the revenue of some major “software companies” and the open source movement is making credible progress toward making a big chunk of it free. What’s left? …
It’s always fascinating to get a Wall Street view of networking, so I was happy to review the William Blair tech outlook. While I don’t always agree with the Street, they certainly have capabilities that I don’t in analyzing the financial trends. Even where we disagree, there’s value in contrasting the Street view with the…
I mentioned yesterday that the cable industry was regulated differently from telcos, and one of the differences is that cable is “capped” on maximum subscribers per provider. Many would like to see that regulation lifted to support M&A more broadly. In the telco space, there’s also an effort for regulatory change underway, this one linked…
“Cable” has always been seen as different from “telecom”. The industry is regulated differently, it’s primary profit sources are different, it has very different infrastructure, and it’s OSS/BSS/NMS tools and strategies are also different. Most insiders in the SDN world say that cable operators are less interested in SDN than telcos, and virtually everyone says…
Stories about network transformation tends to focus on capex, despite the fact that network operators have consistently indicated that opex is likely more important. One reason for this is that opex is one of those giant fuzzball sort of areas where you can make almost any claim and get the numbers to work in your…
Transformation in telecom means investment in something not currently being invested in, but it doesn’t likely mean “new” investment. Most operators have capital budgets that are based on return on infrastructure, which means that the sum of services supported by a network determines how much you spend to sustain or change it. One of the…
Cisco turned in a disappointing quarter, one that screams “Networking isn’t what it used to be!” for all with even mediocre ears. Juniper named a new CEO, one that the Street speculates may have been picked to squeeze more value for shareholders by cutting Juniper’s operating expenses. Such a move would seem to echo my…
Juniper may not have wowed the Street with its last earnings call, but with some of its rivals definitely closer to the drain, earnings-wise, and it’s clear Juniper still has assets in play. The latest Juniper move to leverage those assets is a new slant on the data center of the future, called “MetaFabric”. Unlike…
The NFV ISG released its first public documents in early October, but the most significant release was the details of its process for proof-of-concept demonstrations. PoCs are one of the things that I’ve believed from the first would be essential in making NFV a reality. Specifications don’t write software, and I think the IETF has…
I’ve been blogging over the last week about things related to the SDN World Congress event and what the activity there shows about the emerging SDN and NFV space. I’ve covered issues of deployment and management of complex virtualized systems, high-performance network data paths, and DPI as a service. For this, my last blog on…