It should be obvious that 5G is in trouble, at least in terms of fulfilling all the hopes operators and vendors (in particular) have pinned on it. Nokia’s CEO stepped down, and there was a rumor last week that Ericsson and Nokia were considering a merger (the rumor was squashed, however). Huawei, who claims to…
It may be time to look deeper into intent models. I’ve used the term in a number of blogs, and while the sum of those blogs probably gives an acceptable picture of what the approach could bring to both computing and networking, there seems to be a lot of pressure to rethink both IT and…
VMware disappointed the Street in its earnings call last Thursday. That’s not all that surprising; they’re hardly the first. The company actually turned in decent revenue numbers, but earnings and guidance fell short of expectations. That’s not new in today’s tech market either. So why talk about them? Because if the future is the cloud,…
We live in an IP world, at least insofar as the way the network appears to users. IP remains a largely adaptive protocol, one that makes traffic engineering more difficult. Some of the proposals to modernize IP networks, including SDN/OpenFlow, have focused on centralizing route control for the purpose of improving traffic engineering and potentially…
Augmented reality is a viable focus for a new model of worker empowerment. That’s one reason why it’s important to look at places where the model appears to have failed, even before the concept of AR in empowerment got started. Protocol gave us an opportunity to do that with an article on Daqri, a company…
Barron’s ran an interesting interview with ATT heir-apparent John Stankey, now CEO of WarnerMedia, and it offers some views on how streaming and 5G might transform the telco space. I think these same factors will influence the direction of cable companies, and of course will then pull through influence on the vendor space. We have…
Oversimplification is never a good thing, and sometimes it can be downright destructive. One of those times is when we look at “distributed” application models, which include such things as serverless and microservices. Classical wisdom says that distributing applications down to microservices is good. Classical wisdom says that hosted service features are best when distributed…
Cisco released their Annual Internet Report, and it’s the typical mixture of interesting stuff, insight, and blatant hype. With Cisco, though, even their hype is interesting, so I want to look at the report and sort out the angles, hopefully adding some analysis that will clarify just what pieces of the report fit in which…
The impact of the cloud on enterprise IT, either technology impact or financial impact, has been a topic difficult to navigate. The financial impact, meaning whether cloud spending will erode IT spending, is particularly difficult, because it depends on a number of factors where popular opinion seems to diverge from objective reality. When that happens,…
In a lot of ways, Cisco is the most important company in networking. They have the largest strategic influence on buyers in my surveys, and they have the most strident and effective marketing. They’ve been no slouch in market performance, either. It’s because of all of this that we need to look hard at their…