Nokia turned in some fairly abysmal numbers, putting itself in an admitted “zero-margin” space. That shouldn’t come as a major surprise, but it does make it clear that there’s something fundamental going on in the communications space that’s overturning a lot of old thinking—or at least it should be overturning some. The Nokia problem was…
VMware is buying enterprise social/collaboration player Socialcast, and the move is demonstrating a lot of interesting things about the future—of collaboration, virtualization, and of course VMware. We may be on the cusp of some interesting changes. “Collaboration” is the term we apply to communication between workers aimed at reaching some collective decision or combined work…
Cisco is said to be announcing a new white-label managed service offering that’s designed to be resold by network operators (presumably Cisco customers) to rebrand for the SMB space. Cisco would provide the actual remote management resources. The move is yet another interesting slant on how Cisco thinks it can help operators, make more money…
We’re continuing to see more developments in the cloud space that go beyond the obvious (the hype) and address some of the important issues. One in particular is also demonstrating some important facts about the cloud and cloud services; it’s the “Database.com” offering from Salesforce. Cloud databases have been an issue of increasing importance because…
TMF’s Management World conference continues to show itself as a kind of cross-section of market and technology issues for the NGN. This particular body, unlike most standards bodies, has long been almost a business, a marketing powerhouse that’s jealously guarded and effectively promoted its prerogatives. The question is whether it can now overcome some of…
Amazon and Barnes & Noble are obviously engaging in a war over the ebook market, and there are new dimensions to the battle emerging every week. In the latest move, B&N announced a new gray-scale Nook that’s conceptually between the older dual-screen eInk Nook and the color model that’s grabbed attention as a poor man’s…
The FCC just announced that US broadband is failing to meet the requirements set in the Telecom Act, which isn’t exactly a surprise given that’s what it’s been saying all along. What’s infuriating about the release is the blatant manipulation that’s inside. For example, they headline that over 20 million Americans are “denied access to…
Verizon has taken yet another “leadership” step in defining how operators see their revenue futures. The company has indicated it would be likely acquiring small software companies to create SaaS offerings hosted on the Verizon cloud. I don’t think that the significance of this move is being appreciated, and so I want to open this…
Some data from Nielson suggests that tablet users are perhaps more focused on social media than on streaming video. The data shows that while e-readers outnumber tablets by an enormous margin, people are relatively unlikely to be e-reading while watching TV, but are rather likely (presuming they have a tablet) to be using a tablet. …
The optical networking conference this week is opening some interesting issues about the future of “the core”, and probably even more interesting issues regarding networking overall. While the focus of media coverage has been 100G Ethernet, the real question is how networks are valued, or made valuable. We might call the current situation in the…