Today’s market isn’t an easy one for network equipment vendors, especially those focused on service providers. Nokia may have a strategy to navigate this critical space, and if so every vendor needs to consider it. In its current quarter, Nokia beat on all the key financial metrics, and held to its guidance, which is pretty…
Juniper is an interesting bellwether of networking trends. They’re a major player in the data center and WAN markets for enterprises, operators, and cloud providers, and because they’re second to Cisco in the space, they are under more pressure to be aggressive and innovative. Juniper’s quarterly call on Wednesday showed a beat on all the…
How do we create portable code in hosted-function services for the network of the future? There are a lot of things involved in making virtual-function code portable, and I’m going to use the term “code” in this blog to indicate any software that’s designed to create network features and that isn’t a part of a…
In my blog of April 22, 2021, I postulated there would be three “planes” in a 5G network, the top plane of which being the “service plane”. I mentioned it a bit but didn’t get too far into it, despite the fact that if there’s a broad opportunity for new telco revenue to be had,…
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…