The first full week of January is a traditional time for the Street to be looking at IT spending for the coming year, and this year is no exception. We have predictions and analysis for networking, data centers, cloud computing, and pretty much everything else. I also had an unusual number of CIOs contact me…
I saw something recently in Fierce Telecom, with the tag line that if NFV was training wheels, then cloud-native was the real deal. It’s heartening in one sense that we’re facing the fact that NFV is behind the times, perhaps hopelessly so, but it’s an oversimplification to say that “cloud-native” is the future of NFV. …
There are some questions you would never have asked. “Should telcos become banks?” is surely one of them, but as this Light Reading story shows, the question has been asked. Orange, surely a telco, has already taken the step, which prompted the story. A lot of people have written about the topic, with almost all…
VMware has done a lot of very smart things recently, but what’s perhaps the biggest thing they’ve done—the Pivotal acquisition that just closed—may or may not be among them. If it is, then VMware is positioned to be a killer player in the cloud market in 2020, and if it’s not, then VMware is going…
What we have here is a failure of abstraction. Yes, a stylistic variant on the famous “failure to communicate” line in “Cool Hand Luke”, but true, and never more so than at this dawn of a new decade. In 2020, we need to fix some of the problems we’ve fixed in the past, and in…
Lies, hype, truths, and 2020. I guess that’s the sort of thing I’d be expected to write to open the New Year, and so that’s what I intend to do. The bad news is that all these descriptive words will apply to some of what we hear this year, and the good is that I…
Can a monolithic application be cloudified? That’s one of the critical questions for network operators, because so much of their operations/management software inventory is monolithic. To make matters even more complicated (and, arguably, worse), most of the implementations of management tools for things like NFV and even zero-touch automation, are in large part monolithic. Are…
It may be that Cisco still has more to show us in their network transformation. Their Acacia announcement, followed by Silicon One, was IMHO a big step toward a new model of networking. It just could be that their Exablaze deal was another. Exablaze is a company specializing in low-latency networking, meaning building networks that…
Perhaps is the biggest technical barrier to cloud-native in telecom is reconciling microservice behavior with network service behavior. If service QoS is limited by microservice and cloud-native implementation, then cloud-native suitability for telecom is in doubt. If service setup, change, and restoration is limited by the way microservices are orchestrated, then cloud-native suitability for telecom…
Every network operator worldwide faces profit challenges. Some face challenges more acute than others, of course, and we need to watch those operators to get an advance look at what may be coming for the industry overall. AT&T is such an operator. They have a challenging demand density, they made some mistakes in their early…