Alcatel-Lucent announced its new strategy, and frankly I was disappointed in the articulation—or at least the amount of stuff that got articulated. The “Shift” plan to me so far states the obvious, and that makes it less obvious whether Alcatel-Lucent really has a long-term strategy that can save it. If you look at the high-level…
Today we have two pieces of cloud-market change, and as we’ll see, it’s important to consider the two as parallel developments. One involves Red Hat, and the other IBM. A while back, I commented that Red Hat’s absence from the cloud space was puzzling from a strategy perspective and perhaps harmful to the company’s prospects. …
One of the more interesting M&A rumors is the story that AT&T had made a bid for Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, a move that was blocked (says the rumor) by the Spanish government. Telefonica has since denied any overtures were made, and it seems likely that one or the other of these negatives would be…
We’re seeing more evidence of major changes in the networking industry, this time from the vendor side of the picture. Obviously one impact of a sudden shift in network operator business models would be a collateral shift in spending that would impact vendors depending on their product portfolios. I think some of those impacts can…
There’s been some potential progress on a couple of fronts in the cloud, SDN, and NFV space (a space I’m arguing will converge to become the framework of a “supercloud”). One is the introduction of Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS framework as a commercial offering, and the other a proposal to converge two different OpenFlow controller…
When your stock dips at the point in your big annual event where it’s clear that you have nothing else to say, you’re not in a happy place. That’s Apple’s problem for today. There’s no question that the Apple aficionados liked the chances to iOS and OSX, and perhaps liked the new notion of an…
The notion of hosting centralized network functionality appeals to even enterprises, and operators positively salivate over it. There is a potential issue, though, and that’s the performance of the servers that do the hosting. Servers weren’t really designed for high-speed data switching, and when you add hypervisors and virtualization to the mix you get something…
UBS just published a brief on their SDN conference, where a number of vendors made presentations on the state of SDN, its issues and benefits, their own strategies, etc. If you read through the material you get an enormous range of visions (not surprisingly) of what SDN actually is, a consistent view that somehow SDN…
Big Switch has announced its defection from Open Daylight, and the move has been greeted with all the usual “I-told-you-so’s”. According to the majority who’ve commented so far, this is because Cisco contributed its open-source controller as a deliberate move to crush the business model of Big Switch. Well, I don’t know about that. First,…
My biggest gripe about cloud coverage in the media is that we’re almost never talking about what’s really going on, but rather simply pushing the most newsworthy claim. One result of this is that when something happens in the cloud space, even something that’s inherently newsworthy, we have no context of reality into which it…