For most who read my blog, network issues and opportunities are paramount. The good news for that group is that the Street almost universally sees networking at the top of the hardware opportunity list. The bad news is that when you look at the companies the Street really likes, you don’t see any of the…
Wall Street, like most everyone, tends to put out prediction pieces at the end of the year. While the Street’s predictions aren’t always right, they do represent the view of a group of people whose livelihood depends on predicting at least major revenue trends. My own research isn’t always right either, so perhaps by looking…
What statement about the cloud has the largest number of enterprise agreements? “My cloud services are too expensive!” is the answer. Not only that, cloud costs are the number one reason enterprises give for not doing more in the cloud, and the number one reason they give for looking at another cloud provider. On the…
Ciena just posted the first billion-dollar quarter in its history, and that’s surely big (and good) news for the company and investors. What sort of news is it for the networking market overall? I think it’s a sign of some major shifts in thinking and planning, things subtle enough to be missed even by some…
One of the biggest differences between today’s component- or microservice-based applications, and applications likely to drive the “metaverse of things” or MoT that I’ve been blogging about, is the level of deployment dynamism. Edge applications aren’t likely to be confined to a single metro area; a “metaverse” is borderless in real-world terms because its virtual…
Last week, I blogged a series on the evolution of network and edge-hosted services, SD-WAN, SASE, and NaaS. I proposed that the edge platform of the future be based on a “metaverse of things”, and that the way MoT would likely develop would be as a set of layers. Today, I want to look at…
If edge computing is going to happen, something has to initiate a model and drive/fund its deployment. There have always been three applications associated with the edge; 5G hosting, IoT, and (recently) metaverse hosting. My view from the first was that 5G hosting could provide an initiation kicker, but NFV is barely aligned with current…
Here’s a simple (seemingly) question. If SASE is all about secure access to services, what services are we securely accessing? Is SASE, or NaaS, about a transformation of services, or a transformation of the on-ramp to existing services? Enterprises and network operators are both struggling with that question, according to my contacts with both groups,…
Amazon’s AWS re:Invent extravaganza is worth exploring for two reasons. First, it offers a look at where the market leader in cloud computing is going to try to take the market overall. Second, it offers an opportunity to see where cloud software features and tools will be heading, and that could have a major impact…
Every year, network operators do a technology planning review in the fall, usually between mid-September and mid-November. The purpose of the review is to identify the technologies that will compete for funds in the yearly budget cycle that usually starts after the first of the year. I’ve tracked these review cycles for decades, and I…