Yahoo surprised investors by backpedaling on returning cash to investors from their exit of their China Alibaba Group position. Though Mayer hasn’t said what she’d do with the money instead, one obvious possibility is M&A. There has been talk about having Yahoo develop or acquire platform service capabilities that would exploit social and mobile trends,…
Facing up to change isn’t easy; human nature seems to have deeply entrenched the notion that the safest and best is what’s already been done. Maybe the reason is that new things often produce bad things, particularly for established markets and players. Today we have two examples of change-facing, one where a company is adapting…
If you’ve followed my blogging here, you know that I’m a special fan of the class of system tools called “DevOps”. These tools are designed to automate application deployment by transferring information from the development process to a form of template, container, or script, that can then be used to install the application when it’s…
JP Morgan put out an interesting financial-markets note on “big data”, illustrating the changes it could bring and the value it could create for vendors. I agree with both those points in principle, but I think there’s a bit more to the problem (and thus to the realization of the opportunity) than the note suggests….
When Cisco announced its ONE architecture I was pleased that they were addressing the issue of higher-layer SDN intelligence. As I blogged at the time, and as I still believe, there is no practical commercial conception of SDN possible absent a set of layers on top of the SDN controller to couple forwarding table entries…
AT&T’s decision to buy NextWave is clearly a gamble, though insiders tell me that it’s not as much a wing and a prayer as it might seem. NextWave has a bunch of 2.3GHz spectrum (WCS or Wireless Communications Services) that was never certified for mobile use, and the payoff for the deal seems linked to…
There’s been a lot of speculation on “who will buy NSN” these days, with candidates all over the map. If you look at the mix who have been suggested or who might be logical, you see that there’s an issue in the marketplace that would have to be handicapped before you could pick from them,…
Ben Verwaayen, in an interview with the Financial Times, took responsibility for Alcatel-Lucent’s problems, which is fair given that he’s the CEO. My only issue is that I think he’s looking at the WRONG issues. Ben seems to think the problem was too much optimism two months ago. I think it was too much inertia…
The whole topic of SDNs has been fuzzy almost from the onset. Hopefully by now you know my own view is that SDN is a transformation of networks whose value is largely created by the transition of IT to a cloud model. In short, SDN is the network side of the cloud revolution. Because “cloud”…
According to the running commentary after the announcement, Oracle’s purchase of Xsigo is a step toward SDNs, or maybe it’s to go after VMware in network virtualization, or to boost its cloud credentials. And I thought coverage of the Nicira deal was vacuous! Of course, the Xsigo probably doesn’t do any of these things, and…