Server vendors have both special benefits and special challenges in the battle for telco infrastructure, the “telco cloud” or “carrier cloud”. On the plus side, any cloud requires servers, and having a seat at that table gives a vendor more leverage in deals, and may also help keep competitors out. On the minus side, the…
If you look at a service, or an application, you see something that’s deployed and managed to support a mission that’s really defined by the elements you’re working with. We can deploy the components of a service by connecting the feature elements, but how they interact with each other to produce the service is really…
Changes in direction are always a challenge, both for vehicles and for companies. What’s particularly problematic are changes in direction that take a company from a historical, comfortable, incumbent position and out into the wild and competitive world. VMware is facing that kind of direction change, and their current quarter says their approach could use…
Nvidia, whose RISC goals have been stymied by regulatory pushback against their purchase of ARM, is now saying that their initiatives in RISC and other non-traditional CPU models may only be getting started. The reason that’s the case is tied to what’s going on in computing overall. The reason it’s important it that it could…
I’ve long been of the view that the best way to manage a network service through its entire lifecycle is to model the service and base software on state/event behaviors defined within the model. I’ve also dabbled with the use of models in defining social/metaverse and IoT applications. Through all of this, I’ve been increasingly…
Cisco is always a barometer of the network status quo, and they turned in a solid quarter last week, but one that may offer a view of how the future of networking could impact the future of network vendors. Cisco’s way of dividing its product segments makes it hard to decode their details, but we’ll…
We are about to step into a new age in networking, and so it’s not surprising that we have a story about a revolutionary vendor posted by SDxCentral: “DriveNets CEO Claims 65% Win Rate Against Cisco, Juniper, Nokia.” Like a lot of stories, the headline here is a bit click-baity. The actual claim says that…
I’ve talked in past blogs about new network models, about operators’ attempts to control costs. I’ve also noted little progress in accepting anything useful. OK, what do the network operators, the telcos in particular, do now? They’ve struggled for decades to reverse the negative slide in profit per bit, they’ve refused to (or been unable…
A LinkedIn post from James Crenshaw of Omdia reminded me that we were at the 10th anniversary of NFV, which is sort-of-true. Ten years ago this fall, the original 13 operators behind the concept issued a paper titled “Network Functions Virtualization: An Introduction, Benefits, Enablers, Challenges & Call For Action” (I filed a response to…
It’s time to think about separating the hype from the reality again. Web3, the metaverse, and even cloud computing are being hyped to the point where our irrational focus is hurting the technology we hope to promote. There’s nothing as discrediting to a technology like a good, disastrous, market crash. We could set up such…