Brocade announced its earnings yesterday, and they generally exceeded Street estimates. I was interested in their quarter and their comments on it because Brocade is arguably the first of the second tier in network vendors, a player with a real chance to become a giant if they play their cards right. The key comment from…
Cisco reported their numbers, and it’s fair to say that they showed that the company has promise but didn’t show there was a guarantee that promise could be met. To me, a single comment from CEO John Chambers sets the tone: “Cisco’s strategy, delivering integrated architectures that address the top business opportunities and the biggest…
It’s nice to have some good news on the SDN front. Ericsson took the opportunity to present their SDN strategy to me as a ramp-up to demonstrating some of the key elements at MWC in Barcelona the week of Feb 25th. They also announced a cloud strategy that included support for OpenStack, which is important…
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…