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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…