John Chambers has been an icon in networking for decades, but at the same time the Street (and everyone else who can count years) realizes that at some point there will have to be a new Cisco CEO. Just who that might be and when it might happen has been, at times, a major distraction…
Red Hat announced its numbers, and as one Street report said, “the streak is broken”. The company was light on revenue and net income, considerably below both the average of its performance over time and its prior year. The result was that the Street has bumped them after hours, but the Street’s judgment may in…
Operators who talk with me about OpenFlow present a challenge wrapped in a paradox for those who want to promote the technology of SDNs. The paradox is that operators have a variety of highly tactical targets of interest for SDN principles, a variety that’s hard to harmonize with a single drive forward. The challenge is…
Oracle is one of the most interesting companies in the industry, I think. Not only is it a tech giant and bellwether for the space overall, it’s innovative and it’s got one foot on each side of quite a few of the critical industry divides; cloud versus data center, open-source versus proprietary, software versus hardware. …
SDN buzz continues, but it’s my view that most of the stories coming out qualify for the “kiss the SDN baby” award; political theater. What’s happening is simply that SDN is hot, that vendors are afraid of being put at a competitive disadvantage for lack of SDN support, and so are moving to take the…
There’s been a lot of discussion about Cisco’s ceasing development of its Application Control Engine elements for some of its most popular switches and routers. More, given that the company has also cut investment in WAAS. Some are taking this as Cisco’s abandonment of the spaces to more agile competitors, but I don’t think so….
If you were having a problem accepting my view that Amazon was determined not to be a Google supporter even though Android is the basis for the Kindle Fire line, listen up. Amazon is releasing its own mapping tools and APIs, following in Apple’s footsteps, and for exactly the same reasons. Mobile is about local,…
The iPhone 5 may not be revolutionary (well, let’s be fair—it’s not) but there’s never been much doubt it would be successful, and in fact the early allotment sold out in no time and much faster than earlier models. The question for the industry now is how to deal with this phenomenon. It’s not the…
Well, Apple finally did the iPhone 5, and there are already sharp differences in how the launch is perceived in terms of the significance of the changes and what they say about Apple. I think some of these differences arise from perspective; some care only about Apple’s share price, some about its long-term future, and…
It’s obvious that software defined networking is the “next big thing”, at least from the perspective of the media and those few VCs prepared to invest in infrastructure. In the last couple weeks we’ve seen some new details on SDN plans from Plexxi, a long-standing stealth startup in the space, and news that “MPLS fiend”…