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,…
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…
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…
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. …
We had a couple more earnings reports that seem to underscore the general theme that network spending, if not all of tech spending, is under pressure. Brocade did OK versus expectations but issued what the Street believed was tepid guidance. Aruba undershot by a very significant margin, and specifically called out Cisco’s “bundling” strategies as…
Cisco reported their numbers, which were much awaited and which the Street viewed as highly favorable. The stock is up nearly 10% pre-market on the results, with both revenue and EPS beating estimates and guidance seen as generally good. Given that most tech companies were weak this quarter, the results are impressive and you always…
We’re hearing again about the goal of applying OpenFlow to manage optical networks, and the interest surely reflects the value that “converging” layers of the network might have to network operators. I’ve commented before on the fact that a packet-match-and-forward architecture like OpenFlow is hardly suited to applications where packet examination isn’t possible because data…
Ericsson, Huawei, and NSN have entered into a somewhat-historic agreement to break down interoperability barriers for OSS/BSS systems. OSSii is essentially an agreement to share interface specifications not to cooperate in broader development, or to set new standards for OSS/BSS interoperability (still largely under the TM Forum). The promise is to facilitate rollouts of new…
Anyone who’s read my blogs knows I’m no fan of current FCC Chairman Genachowski. I’ve always believed his role in the VC-and-startup world has made him too much a fan of Internet novelty and not enough a fan of reality. In particular, I’ve been critical of the neutrality position he’s championed, which includes the preservation…
It’s “recap Friday” again, and there are a lot of little items that (as usual) add up to some significant industry trends. Facing important truths about something you depend on is never easy, and it looks like the industry as a whole and some companies in particular are now going to have to do that….