I’ve blogged a lot about declining revenue per bit and commoditization of hardware in networking. The same thing is happening in IT, driven by the same mass-market and consumerization forces. You can’t sell a lot of something that’s expensive; Ford made the automobile real by making it cheap. So arguably networking and IT are getting…
There are a couple of recent news items that involve a big player, and while the focus of the news is different I think there is a common theme to be found. One is a little impromptu talk reported on Beet.tv from Cisco’s John Chambers at CES, and the other is Oracle’s acquisition of SDN…
Yesterday, the CloudNFV project (of which I am Chief Architect) announced a new Integration Partner, Shenick Network Systems. Shenick is a premier provider of IP test and measurement capabilities, and I’m blogging about this not because of my connection with CloudNFV but because the announcement illustrates some important points about NFV and next-gen networking in…
I’ve blogged through all of 2013 that of our three “revolutions” of cloud, NFV, and SDN, it’s the cloud that’s the senior partner. The transformational aspects of SDN and NFV depend to a very large degree on our harnessing cloud capabilities to host network features. We’re also hearing that Amazon is on a tear, with…
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…