Wall Street is a lot more intertwined with the networking industry than just in the logical financial sense, or as a big network technology user. These people are the ones who win big or lose big by betting on company successes and failures, so it’s a good idea to take their pulse from time to…
NSN is selling its optical transport assets to the same private-equity firm who bought Sycamore’s technology assets, and the move doubles down on a bet that NSN is making—namely that broad product lines aren’t valuable in networking any longer. I think that at one level that’s true; my research shows that buyers are much less…
Cisco continues it’s M&A tear, this time picking up Cariden, a specialist in aligning network behavior with business goals. The focus of the deal has been on what Cariden could do for Cisco’s SDN position, but Cariden is more complicated than that, I think. It also enhances Cisco’s position in Network Functions Virtualization and improves…
Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions group thinks that hybrid clouds will be one of the top trends, and a telling comment is that they see the cloud supplanting the VPN as an enterprise service. While this may seem outlandish on the surface, I think there’s a lot of logic/truth behind the statement, and it also explains some…
I’ve been harping on Alcatel-Lucent’s need to offer something tangible in cloud and SDN, and they’ve announced something in both spaces. The question is whether the concepts will go far enough, especially given the relatively late positioning. It’s not that all their competitors have jumped out though, so Alcatel-Lucent still has a chance to set…
Google has decided to drop its prices for cloud service and expand its IaaS offerings, apparently to compete better with Amazon or to respond to a cloud market that seems to be racing for the bottom. Another possibility is simply that there’s a lot of “undifferentiated interest” in the cloud, meaning that buyers don’t know…
Cisco is certainly giving all of us a lot to think about (probably more than a lot for its competitors). The prevailing view here is that Cisco bought a mid-market WiFi company. If that’s true then they need their collective heads examined. The price is too high for what Meraki brings to Cisco’s WiFi, incrementally. …
I’ve said for months that Cisco needs to be a definitive cloud player and to do that, a software player. Cisco has now demonstrated it’s serious about being a cloud player with its acquisition of Cloupia, a fairly impressive player in the growing space of provisioning/DevOps, particularly for the cloud. I think this is a…
One of the most fascinating and frankly frustrating things about our networking industry is the fact that companies often get a truly great insight, lead the market in introducing it and even productizing it, and then let it languish while the rest of the industry moves the concept forward. There’s nothing harder to take than…
Cisco’s earnings calls are almost always an education, and this one may be of particular significance given that the industry (and the global economy) is teetering on the edge of maybe-good, maybe-bad. Cisco showed some good, and some of Cisco’s lessons are even applicable to other companies in the space. Some aren’t and shouldn’t offer…