I think that the HPE acquisition of Juniper is the most significant company-side event in the network equipment market, and I think it’s critical for both HPE and Juniper. But execution is critical, and last week, HPE offered the first projections of a year’s worth of the combination. The Street didn’t like it. I asked…
If You’re a Telco Equipment Vendor, What Now?
Let’s face it, when there’s an uncertainty in a market, companies get antsy because investors do. When the uncertainty is doubled because the sellers and buyers both have issues, they get real antsy. So it is with telecom, and a Light Reading article on Ericsson is a good indicator. The basic problem with telco equipment…
The Role of AI in Reducing Telco Opex: Convincing?
We still can’t really pin down the value of AI overall, so it’s hardly a surprise that telcos can’t pin it down either. What’s a bit surprising to me is that a lot of the talk about AI savings ignores the fact that AI is a technology that can be applied to enhance automation, and…
How to Read the Coming Earnings Reports
Earnings reports are always important, both to assess a company’s position and to validate (or invalidate) the market assumptions they’re making in their product planning and positioning. This quarter, the third calendar quarter of 2025, will be particularly important because of the massive bets tech companies have placed on AI. Obviously, companies like Google and…
Telcos Need to Unlearn Some Shakespeare
Shakespeare said “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” No offense to the Bard intended, but the problem with the tide/opportunity analogy is that tides happen more than once. You…
AI May Mean Everything Passive is Active
In a lot of ways, the IT we have today is derived from, and little different from, what we had in the 1960s. We still think of applications, input-process-output, and reports and documents generated by applications as the way to integrate IT with business processes. Why do we do this? Because we’ve not really thought…
Operations, Automation, and AI
A recent piece in SDxCentral talking about the data issues associated with network operator automation projects was interesting to me as yet another example of the parallels between enterprises and operators. Enterprises looking at the use of AI in operations have made the very same point to me; the issue is far less one of…
The Role of Consumerization in AI
Sometimes the past can teach us the future. Is AI one of those times? Perhaps, so I want to take a new look at some past data to try to find out. Those of you who follow my blog know that I’ve often talked about the past three cycles of enterprise investment in information technology….
Can Telcos Make a Play in the AI Agent Space?
For quite a while, people have been suggesting that AI would save the telcos. So far, that’s not happened, and in fact it’s far from clear how exactly such an outcome could come. Would AI add revenue? There’s no current evidence that AI generates more demand outside the data center. Would it reduce costs? So…
An AI View of the Impact of Tech on the US Economy
You may know I’ve been experimenting with Google’s Gemini AI, and yesterday I asked it to analyze the relationship between US GDP growth, technology prices, and technology spending since 1950. THIS is the result, as posted on my TMT Advisor site. Email and RSS:
