Barclays released a note on Cisco yesterday, based on an interview with David Ward, and there are some interesting comments and views, most of which I think are consistent with how I see Cisco’s evolution. The key point, I think, is that in a technical sense Cisco is moving to become a cloud company in…
We’re seeing some indications in IT spending, particularly on personal computing, that suggests businesses are cautiously restoring some of their budgets for technology. The numbers also show that the PC isn’t totally without friends, which is important both for the computer space and for networking. If you look at the PC market, you’ll find it’s…
I noted yesterday in my blog that vendors and operators alike were guilty of what might be called “Oldthink”, the practice of honing in on today’s problems through the mechanisms of past solutions and thus simply reinforcing the past instead of creating a future. We have other examples of that phenomena today, and in other…
We’re now hearing that Alcatel-Lucent’s “Shift” may not be shifting enough and that the company is planning to lay off 15,000 and hire back 5,000 new employees for a net loss of about 10,000 workers. There are lessons here for Alcatel-Lucent, obviously, but also I think for the industry. Alcatel-Lucent’s problems fall into two simple…
Ever since Blackberry turned in its abysmal numbers, stories have vacillated between “Blackberry goes private and becomes a 900 pound gorilla behind the cloak, then emerges to terrorize the industry” and “Blackberry gets bought by somebody who terrorizes the industry.” You probably see the common denominator here. Blackberry in any non-dead state is a terror…
Nothing is ever as easy as it seems, particularly in networking. We had some recent proof of that this week as RAD announced a bit more about its “Distributed NFV” concept. On the one hand, “classical NFV” says that you want to remove functions from devices and host them in servers. RAD says that’s not…
We’re in the throes of one show involving SDN and NFV and in less than 2 weeks, the SDN World Congress event where NFV was launched in the first place will be underway. It’s not surprising we’re getting a lot of SDN and NFV action, so let’s take a look at some of the main…
Most people would agree that NFV crosses over a lot of subtle technology boundaries. It’s clearly something that could (and IMHO likely would in most cases) be hosted in the cloud. It’s something that is certain to consume SDN if there’s any appreciable SDN deployment, and it’s something whose principles of orchestration and management are…
The world of SDN continues to evolve, and as is usually the case many of the evolutions have real utility. The challenge continues to be the conceptualization of a flexible new network framework that exploits what SDN can do, and at an even more basic level provide the framework by which the different SDN models…
Cisco’s announcements on Network Convergence System (NCS) follow their normal pattern that’s fairly characterized as “chicken-little” sales stimulation. The network sky is falling because everyone and everything is going to be connected and demanding their bits be transported. Suck it up, operators, and start spending! Underneath this opportunism is a reality, though, which is that…