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;…
AT&T has joined Verizon in spinning off some rural phone lines/customers that didn’t present a profit/revenue profile that matched their future requirements. This trend, and others, is what has motivated the FCC to take up the issue of “transition”, and the outcome of the FCC’s review could have major impacts. I noted the FCC’s intentions…
Juniper announced it was buying its long-time network monitoring and planning partner, Wandl. Obviously this could indicate a strategic shift on Juniper’s part, particularly when you marry it with the departure of the “Microsoft camp” (CEO Kevin Johnson and software head Bob Muglia). It could also mean nothing much, and it’s too soon to call…
I’m happy to report that the CloudNFV project’s Proof-of-Concept application to the ETSI NFV ISG has been approved. We were the first group to make formal application, the first to be approved (as of today, we’re the only ones in either category, but I expect much more through the first quarter). It’s a validation of…
I know I’ve blogged a lot this week about industry conditions, but there’ve been a lot of developments in that space and we’re all in this together, industry-wise, in any case. Cisco’s analyst event offers more fodder for the discussion and also I think some clarity on the choices that face us. At one level,…
Citi has just initiated research coverage of the networking space, and I think it’s useful to look at what they say and compare it with what my own surveys and modeling suggest. Wall Street, after all, makes money for people by guessing right on stock trends. The big “however” here is that sometimes it makes…