Is it time to look beyond Open RAN? That question may seem strange given all the positive developments, including the story that Mavenir is looking to build radio units, but I think it’s the perfect time. In fact, it may be inevitable at this point that the focus of open 5G starts to shift. One…
Juniper has clearly gone on an acquisition tear. Just as they’ve completed their acquisition of SD-WAN technology leader 128 Technology, they’ve announced the purchase of Apstra, a data center intent-based operations automation and abstraction player. Given rival Cisco’s recent container-centric announcements, is Juniper simply trying to counterpunch, or does Juniper see 128 Technology’s contribution to…
Sometimes a term gets so entrenched that we take its meaning for granted. That seems to have happened with “virtual network”, despite the fact that just what the term means and how one might be created has changed radically over the years. In the last year, I asked almost a hundred enterprise and service provider…
Cisco loves containers. There’s no question that container and software-related acquisitions have dominated Cisco’s recent M&A, but it’s sure reasonable to wonder what they hope to gain. Does Cisco think they can become a competitor to cloud software and server companies, are they betting on hosted network elements, or what? Cisco’s Banzai acquisition last month…
Is ATT right about fiber? The CFO says it’s a “three for one” revenue opportunity, which is why the operator says they’re likely to add to their fiber inventory. One clear message you can draw from that is that a one-for-one or two-for-one might not have been enough, which leads us I think to the…
The news for Open RAN just keeps getting better, but we all know that news is an imperfect reflection of market reality. There is indeed a lot of good news and important stuff, but there’s also some major questions being raised by operators, and implied by the very “good news” we’re happy about. Operators are…
What do users and providers think about SASE? Besides, perhaps, that they hate acronyms and the constant creation of “new categories” for the famous quadrant charts? I usually try to get a feeling for this sort of question at the end of the year, because even where there’s no formal tech planning cycle at year’s…
Operators usually do a tech planning cycle that runs from about mid-September to mid-November. The ones I’ve been tracking (about 50) are now done with their cycles, so this is a perfect time to look at what operators think they need to be doing, and facing, in 2021. Tech planning and budget planning, I must…
What is going to happen with information technology? There are a lot of people who wonder about that, who have a significant stake in the answer to that question. There are a lot of answers, too, most of which are simply guesses. Well, there’s no way to make a forecast without an element of judgment,…
One of the factors that limits software portability is custom hardware. While most servers are based on standard CPU chips, the move toward GPU and FPGA acceleration in servers, and toward custom silicon in various forms for white-box switching, means that custom chip diversity is already limiting hardware portability. The solution, at least in some…