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…
Are We Groping the “Cloud Elephant?”
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…
Learning SDN by Picking Blackberries
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…
VMware’s Cloud Plans: Cloudy?
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…
The Right Kind of Cloud Vision
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…
Cisco: Out of Consumer and into…
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: Cases of Cloudaphobia?
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…
Apple: Not About the iPhone
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…
Signposts on IBM’s and Google’s Paths
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…
This Week’s Data Points Point to Metro
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…