Huawei seems to be projecting a future where network equipment takes a smaller piece of the infrastructure budget—IT and software getting a growing chunk. Genband seems to be envisioning a UC/UCC space that’s also mostly in as-a-service software form, and they’re also touting NFV principles. It would seem that the industry is increasingly accepting the…
More on the SDN, NFV, and Cloud Opportunities
One of my previous blogs has generated a lot of discussion on the question of what the SDN market might be, and whether any market-sizing on the SDN space is simply an exercise in hype generation. This comes at the same time as a series of articles, the latest in Network World, that cast doubt…
Playing the SDN/NFV Opportunity Curve
If you take stock of the network equipment earnings thus far, you definitely get a picture of an industry under pressure. I’ve commented on the main players as they’ve come out, and one of the common themes has been that you can’t expect network operators or enterprises to spend more when you’re presenting them with…
Reading into Alcatel-Lucent’s ProgrammableWeb Decision
Alcatel-Lucent has been in many ways the leader among network equipment vendors in service-layer strategy. Their notion of the “high-leverage network” and their focus on APIs and developers for next-gen services has been, in my view, right on the money (literally). Their positioning of their concepts, and as a result their ability to leverage their…
Two Tales of One City
The market giveth, and takes away, but probably in the main it’s the vendors’ own actions that make the difference. We have an interesting proof point of that in two events yesterday—the end of the second NFV meeting in Santa Clara and the earnings call of Juniper, just down the road in the same town….
Out with the Real, In with the Virtual
The attendance at the NFV meeting in Santa Clara seems a pretty solid indication that NFV has arrived in terms of being of interest. It’s not a surprise given the support that’s obvious among the big network operators. They run the meetings and are driving the agenda, an agenda that’s also clear in its goal…
Where Now, NFV?
The majority of the current network hype has been focused on SDN, and either despite the attention or because if it, SDN hasn’t garnered much focus other than hype. We have so much SDN-washing that it’s hard to see what’s even being washed any more. Laundry fatigue in tech? A new concept at last! NFV…
Is IBM Presaging the Death of Strategic Thinking?
IBM delivered a rare miss in their quarterly numbers, and a significant one at that. While the company seemed to focus on execution issues and delays in getting contracts signed rather than the usual macro-economic conditions tech vendors like to blame, I think the problems are deeper for IBM. And for the rest of the…
What Might Intel’s Open Network Platform Mean?
There’s a clear difference between dispatching an ambulance to an accident scene and chasing one there, as we all know. There’s also a difference between a company reacting opportunistically to a market trend and a company actually shaping and driving that trend. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference in this second area, and so…
Facing Networking’s Era of Change
We’ve already seen signs that mobile broadband is gutting at least the near-term PC sales, signs that Intel’s quarterly numbers only confirm. We have lived for over thirty years in the personal computer age, and PCs have transformed just about everything in our lives and in business. Now they’re dinosaurs. My point is that if…