Cisco’s Investor Day was all about their growing position in the software space. Software grew from 20% of revenues in 2017 to 30% in 2021, which is certainly a validation of their claim of software growth. What’s far less clear is whether Cisco’s avowed shift to software is offensive or defensive, and whether it can…
Juniper’s decision to harmonize its implementation of the Open RAN RIC (Radio/RAN Intelligent Controller) with Intel’s FlexRAN program raises again a question I’ve asked in prior blogs, which is whether a network vendor who isn’t a mobile-network incumbent can play in 5G, and by extension whether they could play at the edge. I believe that…
Why are network, application, and data security problems so difficult to solve? As I’ve noted in previous blogs, many companies say they spend as much on security as on network equipment, and many also tell me that they don’t believe that they, or their vendors, really have a handle on the issue. “We’re adding layers…
Anyone who reads tech news or watches TV probably realizes that 5G smartphones are taking off. A part of the reason is that most of the major smartphone vendors make 5G a feature of their newest models, which makes 5G less a choice than something that a new phone pulls through. The question, of course,…
Wall Street has credible reasons to believe that O-RAN is going to end the dominance of the big mobile network equipment vendors, and it may re-jiggle the vendors’ ranking too. The bigger question is the impact it might have in the networking industry overall. It may be that there’s no success in networking in the…
In a move that I found both surprising and unsurprising at the same time, Comcast acquired Masergy Communications, a provider of managed SD-WAN and SASE. It’s surprising because network operators haven’t traditionally purchased either technology or managed service providers. It’s unsurprising both because these aren’t traditional times in networking, and because Comcast knows it has…
Everything old is new again, so they say, and that’s even more likely to be true when “new” means little more than “publicized”. When I talked to the 177 enterprises I’ve chatted with this year, I was somewhat surprised to find that well over two-thirds believed that artificial intelligence was “new”, meaning that it emerged…
Remember “shadow IT?” Even the name seems a little sinister, and for many CIOs it was a threat from the get-go. What shadow IT is all about is the dispersal of information technology purchasing and control to line organizations, creating a parallel set of technology centers. We don’t hear as much about it these days,…
If there’s a vendor in the networking space that we need to watch closely, it’s Cisco. Not only are they a giant, and a master at account control, they’re also the most inventive when it comes to addressing (or creating, or some might say, fabricating) future trends. Their latest earnings report adds some color, perhaps,…
The value of MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) services for wireline incumbents has always been a question mark, given that many cable operators who tried the notion out didn’t get what they’d hoped for. Still, as this Light Reading piece says, there have also been MVNO success stories among at least some of the larger…