Cisco today announced one of their bigger acquisitions—security specialist firm Sourcefire. The move is likely linked to the trends in security that I’ve seen in our surveys—most recently the spring survey published in Netwatcher just a few days ago. It’s also likely to be another Cisco shot at Juniper, whose enterprise strategy is heavily linked…
Everyone knows you have to set boundaries in the real world, to insure that friction where interests overlap is contained and that reasonable interactions are defined. One of the things that’s becoming clear about virtualization—not a la VMware but in the most general sense—is that even defining boundaries is difficult. With nothing “real”, where does…
The earnings reports from Microsoft and Google followed the pattern of other tech reports from this quarter—a revenue miss offset at least in part by cost reduction. There’s been a tendency for the Street to look at these two misses and declare a common cause—that both Google and Microsoft have failed to come to terms…
We had some important tech earnings reports yesterday, and so we need to review them in a systematic way. IBM and Intel are perhaps the two prototypical tech giants, and what they do in concert is a measure of the health of the industry. Let’s start with IBM, who was a poster child for the…
Cyan’s Telesystem win in packet-optical for its Z-series and SDN technology is an interesting indicator of some major metro trends. While it’s victory over TDM is hardly newsworthy, it does show that packet advantages over TDM can justify a technology change—and any time you can justify technology change the barrier to doing something revolutionary is…
So near, and yet so far! How many times have we heard that comment? In the case of NSN with their recent deal with CDNetworks, we have a current example. NSN is seeing beyond the present, but they’re not yet seeing the future of content delivery. That might mean they’re not seeing, or optimizing, their…
What does AT&T’s decision to buy Leap Wireless, Cisco’s decision to do a cloud partnership with Microsoft, and Amazon at three hundred bucks a share have in common? They’re symbols of a market in transition and a call for action to start gathering your troops for some coherent planning. Traditional communications services, which are services…
Yet another set of Street reports and research reports have stopped just short of describing the PC market as “dead”, though a close analysis of the data seems to suggest that the declines are hitting a plateau. My view has always been that we’re seeing the “browser bunch”, those who see technology as a pathway…
Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn may have caught my creation of a LinkedIn Group called “CloudNFV”. Even though the group is currently invitation-only I’ve received many requests for membership, and a select few found the CloudNFV website and figured out a bit of what was going on. Craig Matsumoto of SDNCentral was…
We clearly live in a virtual world, in terms of the evolution of technology at least, but I really wonder sometimes whether everyone got the memo on this particular point. It seems like there’s a tendency to look at the future of virtualization as one focused on creating virtual images of the same tired old…