One of the frustrations of the SDN space (and, sadly, a lot of spaces in the world of tech) is that sometimes companies get so obsessed with washing their products in the sacred water of some new (and press-worthy) technology they miss a chance to make a good and valuable point about what they have. …
Mellanox Technologies just announced a couple of “data center connect” systems designed to allow companies to use fiber to link InfiniBand switches to create linked “cloud” data centers at distances of up to about 50 miles. This development makes what I think are two key points about cloud computing; first, we need to think outside…
The end of a week is my usual recap time, an opportunity to try to collect rumors and minor items and combine them with broader and more visible ones to find some interesting trends. This week, the question that seems to come out of this process is “What’s happening with network equipment vendors?” We all…
Alcatel-Lucent, battered by high costs and declining revenues and by internal tension since the merger, is now going to have to get another CEO. Ben Verwaayen is stepping down, having failed to turn the company’s fortunes around. That he didn’t is beyond dispute. Whether he could have is open to debate in my view, and…
Dell’s decision to buy itself out of being a public company into a private one (with private equity help) generated a gratuitous slap from HP, but it’s clear that there ARE really questions about Dell’s future. The thing is, the same questions can be asked about HP’s future too, and maybe the future of tech…
The devil, they say, is in the details. The difference between motion and progress, they say, is a sense of goal or destination. Well, we have a couple of examples in the news that demonstrates the truth of these statements. We’re hearing more and more about a plan by FCC Chairman Genachowski that would use…
Oracle announced its intention to buy Acme Packet, a company it describes as a leader in session border control technology for carriers and enterprises. On the surface, this would appear to be a deal targeting the VoIP, mobile/LTE, and UC/UCC spaces, and surely that dimension of the M&A will worry network giant Cisco, who has…
Tellabs has, like other network companies, seen its sales slide through the last couple of years, and also like other companies Tellabs has decided to cut back staff, drop a product, and focus on (you guessed it!) mobile and SDN. The big question is whether it’s too late. Tellabs had actually been focusing more on…
It’s Recap Friday, a good time to look back at the sum of smaller items in the news that are individually perhaps not noteworthy, but that might sum up to indicate a valuable insight or trend. Sometimes little boulders can still create a big landslide! Let’s start with the JDSU report; many financial analysts and…
Here’s a question to ponder; “How is Blackberry like most vendors’ SDN strategy?” The answer is “too late to the revolution”. RIM, who changed its name to “Blackberry” to reflect the market reality of where brand loyalty lies, is looking to re-launch more than a name. They have the almost-insurmountable task of making their new…