Strikes against telcos aren’t anything new, but Verizon’s current strike may be of special significance because it’s coming at a time when the company is wrestling with a question no one ever believed would be asked; is there any future in telephony? While Verizon has been profitable, the profits aren’t extravagant by any measure of…
With Brocade’s cut in guidance on its earnings call, the company joined what seemed a parade of network equipment vendors who’ve called the future of network spending into question. Most Wall Street analysts have suggested that Ethernet is coming under pressure and that corporate IT spending is likely to be weak. Both are likely true,…
A number of interesting but small new items have emerged in the tech world, and so we’ll do a quick analysis of them before tackling the ugly economic picture. We’re going to range from network capex to virtualization, but perhaps in the opposite order. VMware has decided that maybe its pricing was more of a…
Cisco is consolidating its video activities into a single unit and its Videoscape head is leaving. The decision seems an odd one to me if you look at things from a market perspective. Videoscape was arguably the most complete suite of content delivery elements available from anyone, but the sheer scope of the product seemed…
The FCC released its first fairly detailed study of Internet performance in promised-versus-delivered form, and while it has some interesting stuff in it, there’s also a rather substantial internal contradiction in the whole study that is troubling for our ability to set broadband policy. It seems the government has ignored the whole basis for IP…
Apple’s iCloud is advancing quickly to production status, and with the progress comes more clarity into what the service will offer. Three things about iCloud caught my eye; Windows integration, the pricing for data storage, and the potential competition with Microsoft’s Live strategy. I’ve noted in the past that one of the biggest issues in…
Huawei, who has been gaining influence by leaps and bounds simply because it’s the network industry price leader, showed real gains in strategic insight in our most recent survey. Now, Huawei is demonstrating that it intends to keep up its “build-a-strategy” trend by naming a kind of “Chief Security Officer”. The mainstream thought is that…
Financial analysts and investors seem to have decided that networking as a sector is in trouble, but most seem to have missed the point on why that’s the case. Yesterday, the markets sent Alcatel-Lucent down about the same 20% that Juniper fell on the day before, suggesting that they believed both companies faced identical headwinds. …
Alcatel-Lucent announced its numbers this morning, and while their results met expectations on the revenue side they fell short of Street estimates on the profit line. That sent their shares skidding pre-market, making them another telecom equipment casualty. The financial analysts are calling this a second-half market weakness, but of course it’s more than that. …
Well, Juniper reported its numbers yesterday after the markets closed, and they booted their quarter and their guidance in a performance reminiscent of Cisco’s last quarterly call. Nothing matched Street expectations, and the stock was down by 17% in the after-market. Part of the issue may have been that the stock was actually up during…