Alcatel-Lucent reported its quarter, and the results were disappointing to say the least. The company suffered from margin pressure, caused no doubt by the competition from arch-rival Huawei. The devil here is in the details, which in some ways are much better for Alcatel-Lucent, and in some ways worse. When you’re a very broad-based supplier…
Supply and demand shape our industry, like they shape pretty much everything in every market, and we see some signs of them both operating today. We also see signs that they often create long-term change after short-term disorder. On the demand side, corporate raider Carl Icahn has taken a 10% share in Netflix, embattled OTT…
We’re starting yet another trade show in what’s always been the “trade show season” of the fall; this time it’s 4G World. The timing may be trite in a calendar sense but it’s fitting in a market sense because we’re certainly on the cusp of some major changes in wireless. The changes may in fact…
The east coast had its “superstorm” and as is often the case people’s view of Sandy varied considerably depending on where they were. Some areas, including where I happen to live, saw little more than a brisk northeaster, and we were only perhaps 40 miles north of landfall. Other areas had major damage even though…
The latest story on Juniper/EMC is that there’s not going to be an acquisition but there will be some dancing, primarily aimed at certifying Juniper’s QFabric as an EMC data center switch. The move is billed by CRN as a “reference architecture” which would imply a much more significant level of integration, but neither the…
The parade of misses continues, so it seems, with Acme Packets, Amazon, Apple, and Ericsson joining in. One might think this proves that economic conditions (those “macro” factors I blogged about yesterday) were to blame after all. I still don’t buy it, and if you look at these companies you see a mixture of root…
The earnings reports from F5 and EMC make it clear that tech in general, and networking in particular, and enterprise most particularly, has serious challenges to face. The largest one, I think, is that people have gotten used to the idea that networking was somewhat immune from macro conditions; clearly it isn’t. But macro conditions…
The Network Functions Virtualization stuff I talked about in my blog yesterday has picked up steam, adding more Tier One sponsors and turning to ETSI to host them as a body. The group is emphasizing that they’re not a “standards group”, hopefully trying to avoid the glacial pace and lack of market responsiveness that characterizes…
It seems the SDN scene just never goes to sleep. Today at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress a group of Tier One operators announced they were launching an ambitious initiative called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to standardize network infrastructure and virtualize network functions/services. As I’m hearing, this activity goes beyond OpenFlow and SDN to…
ATIS (Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions) is going to launch an SDN initiative aimed at generating a viable ecosystemic strategy without the bottlenecks of traditional standardization—take a leaf from the OTT tree. This is sort of hopeful to me not because I think they’ve made any progress at this point, but because they seem to…