UBS released an Ethernet switching report today that confirms the trends that my surveys have shown for two years now—including the fact that it’s the data center network evolution that’s driving enterprise network equipment spending. What my data has also shown is that enterprises are not likely to see a data center network evolution in…
Verizon Takes Another Service Stance
Verizon’s Digital Media Services initiative has been somewhat of a yawn to the press but it’s of great interest to other operators and also to some vendors. Verizon is now launching another program, called the Verizon Strategic Initiatives Council, and this one could be even more important. Perhaps the most significant thing about it is…
Juniper, Clouds, and Broadband Pricing
Juniper has announced a series of new MX router models and a more integrated positioning between its branch routing, service management, and data center strategies. Called the “Universal WAN”, the approach is designed to both create a more deterministic and cloud-ready network to support the evolving enterprise IT plans of enterprises and to leverage Juniper’s…
Microsoft and RIM Add Market Color
Microsoft reported its numbers, and the results are interesting for what they say about the computer market overall. The entertainment side was very strong, thanks to Kinect, but Windows licenses were lower and this trend worried investors. In the middle, the server and Office franchises both delivered strong results. So what does this mean? Let’s…
Business News Erects Tech Signposts
We’ve got more signs of change from the earnings announcements, and as always change is good for some and bad for others. There does seem a bit of a bias toward bad-ness, though. Nokia is going to shift Symbian support to Accenture and cut 4000 jobs. The move illustrates that there are significant challenges for…
Cloud Docs, PlayStation Hacks, and Cisco Rumors
We have today a kind of interesting counterpoint between online value and online risk, and also a demonstration that Orwell was right in his famous trio of seeming contradictions. Sony’s PlayStation network has been hacked and considerable information stolen, and Microsoft and Google are battling over just who has the best online document tools. Personal…
Tablets, Clouds, and Ponzi
Barnes & Noble has finally brought out a true (if dated) Android version for their color Nook, which likely makes it the cheapest tablet around. It’s clear from both the performance and features of the new release and the pronouncements of the company that this isn’t intended to be a general-purpose tablet, but it’s also…
Cloud, or Judgment, Failure?
Amazon has finally restored the “great majority” of its EC2 customers after a failure on its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) cloud DBMS left websites in limbo. The outage has already generated more than its share of commentary, and as usual there are more extreme views than useful ones. Some say that the problem demonstrates that…
Four Lessons in Disappointment
Two “tech embarrassments” lead the news today, and there’s at least one lesson to be learned from each of them. Amazon had a cloud outage that disrupted some websites, and both Apple and Google are accused of tracking users with their smartphone technology. The Amazon outage was apparently related to its distributed RDBMS, though precise…
Is Apple Driving the Services Bus?
There were a lot of happy smiles on the Street yesterday as stocks skyrocketed, and things aren’t looking too shabby today either. Apple and GE posted better-than-expected numbers and at least for the moment the hope of an earnings-season blowout is overcoming concerns about Eurozone debt, US deficits, and even some uneasy unemployment numbers. Apple…