VMware reported its quarterly numbers, which were light in terms of revenue growth, and this caused the stock to take quite a tumble in after-hours trading. The experience of VMware is interesting, I think, because it illustrates a couple of market realities we forget all too often. Reality number one is that market segmentation doesn’t…
Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I’m a believer in the thesis that the cloud changes everything. Yes, I believe it’s over-hyped (what isn’t these days), but it represents the reformulation of the partnership between networking and information technology, and in particular it provides the framework for us to direct…
Last week, Cisco turned away from one of its most important-at-the-time market-expanding initiatives when it sold Linksys off to Belkin. It was the latest in a long string of retreats from the consumer space, the market sector that’s clearly the largest. Some think that the retreat was a bad idea, but I’m not sure that’s…
Microsoft and Juniper both reported their numbers yesterday, and when I looked at their stocks pre-market it happened that both were up exactly the same percentage. Interesting because both companies’ future literally depends on the cloud, and neither company is fully exploiting that reality. Microsoft’s Windows numbers were up for the quarter and off for…
The trouble with earnings seasons (and there are four of them annually so it seems we’re always in one) is that there are a lot of data points you could talk about, many of which are significant. They’re also often disconnected, making it hard to blog about them without writing a book every day. So…
Tech got some semi-good news in two earnings reports yesterday, from Google and IBM. I insert the “semi-“ because the quarter measures the past, which is only an indirect indicator of the future. The most significant insight from the reports is that the politically driven economic slump we had in the holiday period last year…
The future is written in the data points of the present, so let’s start today by looking at some of those data points, then reading some tea leaves. NSN is said to be looking to issue nearly a billion dollars in bonds in a move that may well be a precursor to the joint venture…
The notion of “revolution” is always exciting, sometimes useful, occasionally destructive. The notion of two or three of them at once tips the scales into the latter category in my view. We have been looking at “the cloud revolution” for several years, we’ve just started “the SDN revolution” and now we’re facing “the NFV revolution”. …
It’s sometimes nice to end a week with some analysis of the Street’s view of networking. To hear that there are sometimes contradictions is likely not going to surprise you, and I think contradictions often expose some interesting truths. They also give me a chance to lay out a financial view of industry health. JP…
We filed comments with the operators who generated the white paper on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and I’ve referenced those comments in posts this week. I’m not sure how to find them in the NFV site or whether everyone has access to that site, so I’m posting the material below. This material can be freely…