It looks like IBM has finally settled on a strategy that could lead it to financial success; become Red Hat. The quarter just ended was IBM’s first revenue gain in four quarters, and while there’s little doubt that the marketing theme of “hybrid cloud” helped IBM overall, the only significant sales upside (15%) came from…
Most operators I talk with agree that some sort of network transformation is essential to both managing costs and creating new revenue-generating services. The challenge for them is figuring out how to go about it, not only in terms of technology options but in terms of making a business case for changes. Promised savings in…
How do you prevent vendor lock-in in telecom infrastructure? There have been a lot of ideas in this space, because the problem is one that operators have complained about for decades. The latest notion is for governments to mandate vendor diversity or openness in some way. This isn’t the first time the issue has come…
Do we need to “rebuild the Internet”? There have been many suggestions on how to go about that, but so far none have really changed anything fundamental. Does that mean that we’ve had bad, even dumb, notions, or is there something more fundamental in play? Perhaps what we really need is a reason why a…
VMware is finally going to become independent of Dell. The deal is complex and still needs an IRS ruling on the tax impact to be delivered before it’s final, but it would resolve some long-standing questions about whether being largely owned by a computer vendor would compromise VMware’s credibility where Dell isn’t the primary supplier…
Fusions of networking and cloud aren’t new, but it’s at least novel for such a fusion to be proposed by a network equipment vendor rather than a cloud software vendor. Similarly, it’s not news that the metro portion of the networking is the key to the network overall, but it’s at least novel to combine…
We have tiny operators endorsing O-RAN, and some giant operators saying they’ll be deploying it (at least in some areas) in 2022. We have giant vendors dissing it, while another giant vendor opens a lab that seems aimed at encouraging it, and a third seems to be promoting it actively. Two vendors have gotten together…
Is there something going on with speech recognition, beyond the obvious? Microsoft’s deal for Nuance and its Dragon voice recognition could be seen as a speech-to-text enhancement to Office, but it could also be seen as a way of bringing speech recognition into a higher plane of productivity and personal activity support. Or both. Speech…
What is the right model for the software that’s used to create network services? Sure, we can say that it’s “virtualized” or “containerized” or even “cloud-native” but are those terms really enough to define the properties of the stuff we hope will play a big role in network services? I don’t think so, but I…
How would experts on both the buyer and vendor/seller side see edge computing evolution? I had an opportunity to ask a half-dozen in each of these two groups what they believed would, could, and should happen. The results were very interesting. The first question, obviously, is “What is edge computing”, and all my experts had…