Alcatel-Lucent’s quarter was far from happy, but there were still happy signs in a small increase in revenues and continued improvement in margins. The sales of IP products were also good, and all of this seems to indicate that the “Shift” plan the company outlined (and whose restructuring costs killed the bottom line this quarter)…
My research has been showing a relatively slow uptake rate on SDN and NFV, slower than many would like to believe, and I thought it would be helpful to understand why the model I use is predicting a slow ramp rather than the classic “analyst report” hockey stick adoption. The truth is often less interesting…
We have posted the following on the proof-of-concept mailing list for the ETSI NFV ISG, offering our participation in the NFV body’s work in this area and offering integration with other NFV members. We invite parties interested in integrating with us to review our preliminary guidelines on our website, http://www.cloudnfv.com/ and also to apply to…
It’s another of those recap Fridays, to pick up news that was pushed aside by other developments and to try to drag some cohesion out of the general muddle of news. I think the theme of earnings calls for the week has been “an industry in transition” and so I’ll stay with that theme and…
Verizon’s comments about capex and generally better visibility from vendors has helped the telecom equipment space look a bit better, and of course that’s been our forecast since the spring. My model shows general telecom spending will increase through 2015, with spending in all equipment areas showing some gain. This represents the “last-gasp” modernization funded…
Juniper reported its numbers, which showed better profits and a slight improvement in revenue, and then issued a pretty nice 3Q outlook to boot. The initial reaction of the Street was mixed; some hoped for better performance given Juniper’s multiple, and others were happy. But earnings may not have been the big news. Kevin Johnson,…
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…