What does separating the IP control plane really do? It’s been a kind of mantra for a decade that a separation of the control and data planes of an IP network creates a beneficial outcome. I’ve had a lot of discussions with vendors and network operators on this topic, and there’s a surprising variability of…
Microsoft reported an astonishing quarter, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they mentioned “cloud” 35 times on their earnings call. Unlike IBM, Microsoft was aligned with enterprise strategic shifts through 2020, and it showed on their bottom line. One question Microsoft’s results raises is whether the alignment was accidental or intentional, and if…
What happened to IBM? Things were looking good for the computing giant as recently as last quarter, with the acquisition of Red Hat. Now…well, not so good at all. The most interesting thing is that it may well be that IBM has failed at the test it should have aced, and that is far worse…
Why are enterprises more skeptical about public cloud these days? Vendors and Wall Street research have both noted the attitude. Why? We just came off a period of record consideration of increased public cloud use, and all the pundits are saying that the future is the cloud. Of course, pundits have lied to us for…
Why is it that the focus of 5G discussions is a space that’s relatively unimportant? Why are we largely ignoring the most promising piece of 5G? I’ve been talking to enterprises, operators, and vendors on 5G for months, and over the last month I’ve focused on this underrated piece—millimeter wave. Here’s what I found, and…
Why did ISDN, X.25, frame relay, SMDS, and ATM go wrong? These technologies all spawned their own forums and standards, got international media attention, and promised to be the foundation of a new model of infrastructure. Obviously, they didn’t do that. When we look at current technology hype around things like NFV or SDN or…
What might actually drive telcos to host 5G on public cloud services? That’s another issue that we’re starting to see some clarity on, as operators get the range on 2021 budgets and which of their tech plans might be fulfilled. Clarity doesn’t mean firm conviction, though, as we’ll see. Operators list three reasons for their…
There’s clearly a lot of movement in network equipment, both in technology and competitive areas. There have been some recent developments in the Open RAN space, and other network vendor announcements that suggest changes in 2021. This gives us an opportunity to examine how the trends I’ve talked about in the past are evolving through…
As 5G planning progresses, we’re getting more information from operators about how they’re seeing things like Open RAN, public-cloud 5G hosting, and new 5G-dependent services. Things are still very preliminary, but one thing that’s already clear is that the high cost of 5G licenses (as reflected in recent auctions) are raising the risk level for…
Are we heading toward a union of network and IT concepts, vendors, and even infrastructure? Over the last two decades, companies have slowly pulled networking and IT into a common organization, and today the “software-defined” technologies seem to be uniting the two spaces for service providers and the cloud players. Is this trend real, is…