We’re at the end of 2012, a year many of us will remember less than fondly if for no other reason the politico/economic foibles in both the US and Europe. Call it “The Year of Class Warfare” if you like, economically speaking. We should also remember it as a very important transitional year, and if…
Today we have two indicators that even giant companies have to face reality, meaning have to face the future evolution of their markets and the consequences of their past strategies. Apple (seriously) is said to be looking at an “iWatch” and Cisco has created a software group. OK, you probably don’t find the two comparably…
Some of you emailed me after my last blog to ask about the notion of “SDN domains” so I thought this would be a good time to take them up. First let me say that this is simply my own way of looking at SDN evolution; to my knowledge it’s not sanctioned officially by ONF…
Light Reading is asking the question “Where is SDN Going?” today (http://www.lightreading.com/blog.asp?blog_sectionid=388&doc_id=228144&) and I’d like to propose we ask a broader question, which is “Where is the network going?” as we wind down 2012. The reason is that SDN is a network trend being driven by network forces, and you have to get to the…
Red Hat reported its numbers, which were good, and its stock took a nice pop in after-hours trading. Red Hat also announced something that it’s been needing to announce for some time, a cloud strategy that goes beyond simply saying they can support some open-source cloud stack. They’re a poster-child for the companies in both…
Gosh, somebody other than Cisco is doing M&A; that’s news in itself! What may be even more interesting is that Google is selling off its Motorola Home business to Arris. That creates a new competitor for Cisco, of course, but it may also speak volumes about how IP TV is going to evolve. All the…
Cisco’s still on an M&A tear, this time buying up BroadHop, a company who provides specialized policy control software, particularly what’s now called the Policy/Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and was formerly known as the Policy Decision Point or PDP. These are elements of a mobile multimedia infrastructure designed to provide for service quality control, and…
Cisco’s decision to buy Linksys 9 years ago was hailed by most as an indication the company was going to expand into the hotter consumer broadband space. It was clear to some at Cisco even then that margins on the business were going to be low, and so Linksys was a kind of arms-length business…
GigaOM has published its vision of the cloud for 2013 (http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-well-see-in-2013-in-cloud-computing/), and it’s a decent document overall. Still, there are places I think need further comment, and that’s a decent way to open the last week before the holidays, and for many the last working week of 2012. The first point in the GigaOM commentary…
Alcatel-Lucent has secured the financing it needed to shore up its balance sheet and prevent a messy problem, but the company still faces the same demons it’s faced since the merger. Those problems have been enough to stall a giant with the best strategic influence of all network vendors and the best strategic product set. …