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…
In mid-October the SDN World Congress marks the anniversary of the first NFV white paper’s publication. SDN is far older than that, and the cloud is older still. I attended a cloud conference last week, and while it was interesting and even insightful in spots, it’s pretty clear that we’re still missing a big part…
AT&T made some news by announcing its latest Supplier Domain Program, based on the goal of developing a transformative SDN/NFV architecture for the network. The company is pledging to begin to buy under the program late this year and into 2014 but has not issued any capex updates. That tells me that they expect the…
Well, the story now is that Blackberry is following Dell’s example and going private. Certainly there are simple financial reasons for that, but I also have to wonder whether some of the same “SOX-think” I talked about with Dell be operating here too. If there’s a turnaround in play for Blackberry it’s going to be…