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…
Microsoft’s Path to Reorg? Redefine “SaaS”
I’ve blogged for a couple days now on the evolution of the service providers into software-driven services versus bit-driven services. News is now floating about that Microsoft is going to transform itself from a software company into a devices and services company. So you may wonder how these two things go together, and what it…
Lessons from the CTR
We’ve all no doubt heard (read) the rumors of Cisco’s next core router, the “CTR”, and read that it’s designed to be able to support the “lean core” model. What we haven’t heard is that such a mission is essentially a validation of my long-standing point that network connectivity—bit-pushing—isn’t profitable enough anymore, and that radical…
Transformation: Failing at the Service Level, Starting in Network Equipment
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…
Is “Evrevolution” a Word?
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…
SIP and SDN: Perfect Together, Says Sonus and Juniper
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…
What’s Holding Back Carrier Transformation?
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,…
What HP Missed
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…
Here and There in Networking
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…
A Contral Story that Makes Sense
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. …