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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…