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…
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…
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…
A special note of concern for my friends in the Boston area. I’ve spent a lot of time up there, and while all my personal friends seem safe a surprising number know others who were at least in the area of the blasts. I’m thinking of you all, praying for your safety, and hoping that…
One of my biggest frustrations about SDN has been the lack of a complete top-to-bottom architecture. All of the focus seems to be on the SDN Controller, and that’s an element that is a little functional nubbin that lies between two largely undefined minefields—the lower-layer stuff that provides network status and behavior and the upper-layer…
With the Open Networking Summit about to kick off it’s obvious that there’s going to be a lot of things going on with respect to SDN and cloud networking. The problem we have, in my view, is that all of this is a race to an unknown destination. We’ve picked apart the notion of SDN…
Well, the report on PC sales has pretty well demonstrated that we do have a new dynamic in terms of “personal computing”, a dynamic in which the device that took its name from the concept is falling out of favor. This is coming about because a seemingly small force–mobility–is driving a systemic change in human…
Well, the report on PC sales has pretty well demonstrated that we do have a new dynamic in terms of “personal computing”, a dynamic in which the device that took its name from the concept is falling out of favor. This is coming about because a seemingly small force–mobility–is driving a systemic change in human…
Can it be done? That’s a question that I’m sure gets asked a lot in our industry. We see or hear a news item or claim and we ask “the question”. Part of the prevalence of this favorite question is the cynicism bred of years of hype, of course, but part is also a reflection…
We’ve had a couple of potentially significant developments in the networking space, developments that seem on the surface to be contradictory. On the one hand, big firms like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and Ericsson have created an open-source project for SDN development, called “Open Daylight”. This suggests wide industry support for an open SDN framework, and…