If you assemble the “little stories” of the last week, looking past the big product/technology announcements, you see the indicators of an industry in transition—or one trying to transition at least. To understand what’s happening you have to go back to the US Modified Final Judgment back in the ‘80s and look at the carrier…
True revolutions are pretty rare, especially these days when hype seems to get a decade or more out in front of reality, tapping off all the interest before there’s even anything to buy or deploy. Evolution is something that you generally don’t have to worry (or write) about; timelines are long enough to allow for…
We tend to think of SDN as being some modern revolution, but in fact there have been some pretty significant SDN antecedents in play for decades. One, believe it or not, is in the VoIP space, and now this proto-SDN may be joining with the mainstream SDN wave through a vendor partnership. One of the…
As European operators face the prospect of a single EU market for telecom services (according to the Commissioner for Digital Affairs, Neelie Kroes) and most have already been having profit issues. It’s no wonder these operators are vigorously pursuing cost reductions and new services. It’s also not surprising, given their historical reluctance to be market-makers,…
Sorry I couldn’t blog the last couple of days; at some points I have to travel/work on a schedule that makes blogging impossible! This week we had HP’s earnings, and generally the Street liked what they got, which was better than they expected. I’m sorry, Wall Street, but I wasn’t satisfied. In tech, especially these…
We have a number of interesting items today, ranging from OTT to handsets, so let’s get started! Yahoo’s latest step in reinventing itself is the acquisition of Tumblr, a “blogging site” that’s in some ways a mixture of Facebook-ish, MySpace-ish, WordPress-ish, and other concepts. At a high level, Tumblr is a adspace wrapper around a…
Last week at Interop, Juniper offered a bit more detail on its Contrail stuff. I didn’t get any press release on this, perhaps because Juniper has done a number of SDN announcements already and considered this a follow-up. At any rate, the additional detail offers some color on what might distinguish Juniper’s approach from others. …
We had a couple more earnings reports that seem to underscore the general theme that network spending, if not all of tech spending, is under pressure. Brocade did OK versus expectations but issued what the Street believed was tepid guidance. Aruba undershot by a very significant margin, and specifically called out Cisco’s “bundling” strategies as…
Cisco reported their numbers, which were much awaited and which the Street viewed as highly favorable. The stock is up nearly 10% pre-market on the results, with both revenue and EPS beating estimates and guidance seen as generally good. Given that most tech companies were weak this quarter, the results are impressive and you always…
We’re hearing again about the goal of applying OpenFlow to manage optical networks, and the interest surely reflects the value that “converging” layers of the network might have to network operators. I’ve commented before on the fact that a packet-match-and-forward architecture like OpenFlow is hardly suited to applications where packet examination isn’t possible because data…