We’re coming into that wonderful quarterly ballet that the financial industry calls “earnings season”, a bit of a misnomer given that we actually have four of them any year. Nomenclature notwithstanding, this is a good time to look at the health and ecosystemic pressures of tech overall. We’ll be getting at least a snapshot of…
We continue to see major vendor announcements on SDN, but obviously some are more responsive/revolutionary than others. Juniper has announced its EX9200 product, which it’s billing as a programmable core switch and also a stepping-stone toward SDN. There may be some significant news here, but it’s not on the SDN front—at least not for now….
Alcatel-Lucent finally did their SDN announcement, and it was in most ways a major step forward for SDN, perhaps the biggest step taken by any of the vendors so far. However, as is often the case, the articulation may not do justice to the technology. In fact, in many ways the material was downright murky,…
Oracle’s decision to purchase Tekelec, having just done the Acme Packet deal, seems to be indicating that the software giant has something in mind. The question is what that something might be, and it’s a pressing question because of Oracle’s size and potential in the network market. The obvious possibility is that Oracle is looking…
Alcatel-Lucent is scheduled to announce it’s “data center SDN” vision next Tuesday (April 2nd) and the announcement may well be one of the most important in the company’s history from the perspective of addressing a compelling need. Whether it will be important in the sense of moving the SDN ball forward, even in the specific…
I’m all for having discussions on the impact of SDN. I’d prefer they have some substance, though, and we have a couple of examples this morning of SDN-impact stories that don’t (in my mind at least) hold much water. FRB downgraded both Cisco and Juniper yesterday, citing among other factors the view that SDN was…
Software giant Oracle surprised the Street with a pretty major miss on their top line, sending their stock tumbling in the after-market yesterday and pre-market today. The truth is that the Street may be underestimating the questions here, because all of the indicators for the tech space says that Oracle should be doing better. Software…
The OFC event is offering us a pretty clear picture of a pretty dramatic contradiction, if that’s not a contradiction in itself! On the one hand, it’s increasingly obvious that there is going to be a lot of optical activity in the next two or three years, but on the other hand it’s clear that…
I’m sure by now that everyone who reads this blog knows my view that the hot spot of networking is metro-cloud. Juniper just announced a small-form-factor member of its PTX optical transport box that’s designed in large part for metro applications. The PTX 3000 is part of the Juniper “Converged Supercore”, which is a distributed…
Some of Cisco’s bigwigs have been talking SDN at the Cisco Tech Editor’s conference, and the sum of their perspectives validates our view that Cisco’s plan for SDN is to seize its benefits without embracing much of its technology. Before you decide I’m off on another rant, let me add that I think that’s perfectly…