We had a number of interesting earnings reports today, so let’s get to it! Nokia’s numbers for the last quarter were awful, with smartphone sales falling sharply. You can’t blame that completely on the Windows Phone decision, but it darn sure didn’t help and it’s not going to help them in 2012 either. The question…
We now have some of the major tech leaders reporting with IBM’s and Intel’s quarterly calls, but I still don’t have quite enough to make a definitive comment on how tech will do for the quarter. I do think there are some interesting points in both the IBM and Intel reports, though, and they at…
Cisco, one of the vendors we’ve been watching on the path toward what we think is the critical symbiosis of the cloud and OpenFlow/SDN, has blogged (http://blogs.cisco.com/news/is-it-just-sdn/) about their view of the subject. I’m happy they did, but I confess to being a little confused by what they said. It seems that Cisco is arguing…
Facebook’s double buy of mobile-related companies raises a couple of interesting questions, obviously related to motive and future direction for the social-net giant. While the deal for mobile photo-app player Instagram caught everyone’s attention on price (a billion), it takes at two points to define a line, and to guess where the line might lead. …
Google is making news, again, for its left-of-center management practices. The company turned in an exceptionally good quarter that beat estimates handily, and at the same time it announced it would be doing a 2:1 stock split but one that created only non-voting shares. The goal, obviously and as the company admitted, was to prevent…
Whatever you want to call it, we’re having a revolution in IT. HP’s announcement of a cloud-friendly architecture to build data centers, one that includes prefabricated provisioning tools, was mirrored in many ways by the IBM PureSystems launch yesterday. I think IBM is right in that the new wave is the most important thing in…
Euphonic, huh? Well, earnings season is about to take off, which means we’ll likely have more financial results to review than tech bombshells. Some companies are working to get their stuff out before they go quiet in their pre-earnings period, though, and one of them is HP. After seeming to ignore the cloud, they now…
I’m seeing some progress (perhaps, at least) in the evolution of a logical structure for operator-hosted OTT services. One startup, UXP Systems, has created a kind of shim layer that orchestrates and manages the OTT form of a number of operator services, including voice, messaging, and video. The idea is to provide componentized, orchestrable, services…
The fate of the cloud is also the fate of the network vendors, as I’ve noted before. There is nothing that will stop the use of OpenFlow and SDNs for data center networking, and while arguments that “merchant silicon” can produce the optimum OpenFlow switch are false, it’s true that commodity switches could produce results…
Apple stock may be shooting upward, but Google has its own plans for new products and concepts, and two in particular have what I think is real potential. I’m not saying that they’ll suddenly acquire the momentum of Apple, but I am saying that I think Apple and Google are destined to grow into more…