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…
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…