Light Reading made an interesting point yesterday in commenting about this year’s Interop show. I’ve been to Interop in the past, and it’s always been the bastion of Big Network Iron. Now it may be about to show its softer side, if you believe the advance comments on keynotes and vendor announcements. Trade shows drive…
Today we have the network sequitur and the network non sequitur. In the former category I place the Alcatel-Lucent comments on the demise (or surrender) of their API efforts, and in the latter I place the Cisco guy leaving for Big Switch. And amid all of this, I see tooth fairies and trolls. Some people…
Juniper has released an SDN Controller based on its Contrail acquisition, and the early state of the material makes it difficult to judge just how much of an advance the JunosV Contrail product is, for the industry or for Juniper. I want to stress that I was not briefed on the announcement and so have…
If you look at the developments in the SDN, NFV, and cloud areas, you find that there’s a lot of discussion about “services” and “APIs”. One of the things I realized when I was reviewing some material from Intel/Aepona and Cisco was that there’s a bit of a disconnect in terms of how “services” and…
This has been a pretty active week in terms of happenings of real relevance to the future of networking. We’ve also had some background stuff going on, things that don’t rise to the level of being part of the revolution for various reasons. Taken as a whole, they may be a signpost into how the…
Virtualizing network functionality is the aim of a surprisingly large number of initiatives these days, for a surprisingly large number of reasons. In NFV, operators focused on cost savings versus custom devices in their seminal paper on the initiative, but in SDN the focus is on improving network operations and stability. Other operators have been…
Huawei seems to be projecting a future where network equipment takes a smaller piece of the infrastructure budget—IT and software getting a growing chunk. Genband seems to be envisioning a UC/UCC space that’s also mostly in as-a-service software form, and they’re also touting NFV principles. It would seem that the industry is increasingly accepting the…
One of my previous blogs has generated a lot of discussion on the question of what the SDN market might be, and whether any market-sizing on the SDN space is simply an exercise in hype generation. This comes at the same time as a series of articles, the latest in Network World, that cast doubt…
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…