We don’t build networks like we used to. That fundamental fact should illustrate why it’s important to look at how we should build them, given the changes in both technology and demand that have driven networking in a different direction than it followed in even the recent path. The “right” answer to any network question…
Is virtualization a cost-saving strategy? An article in Light Reading on Monday talks about whether a single-vendor virtual network is more likely to save money than a multi-vendor network (Huawei is a major source for the data). That’s a reasonable question, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s the central question here. That honor goes to…
Truth sometimes hits you in the face. So it is with NFV savings. A Light Reading story quotes Goran Car of Croatia’s Hrvatski Telekom as saying that every function they virtualize has to reduce TCO by 40%. This is particularly interesting, given that most of the ten operators who created the “Call for Action” paper…
The excitement about SD-WAN as an operator offering doesn’t surprise me. My own research showed that for all of this year, the operator sales channel for SD-WAN was the fastest growing. My modeling shows that it’s very likely to make up two-thirds of all SD-WAN sales by the end of next year. But despite this…
Light Reading did a nice piece on OSS/BSS in the cloud, which happens to be the next of my “what operators think” topics, arising from my almost-two-months of exchanges with a variety of operators globally. The LR article covers some things I didn’t get into, and I got into more detail with operators on some…
Because we just came off an edge computing conference, we’ve got a lot of edge computing stories this week. A big part of this is the usual tech hype cycle, of course. When you have ad sponsorship, the site owners have an incentive to create links that are clicked often and so serve ads often. …
Do operators think cloud-native is better than NFV? Do they think NFV could be done in a cloud-native way? What do they think they’ll end up deploying most? These are questions I tried to get answered in my recent exchanges with network operators. I was a bit less successful than I’d hoped, but I think…
What exactly are the attributes of a good virtual network? This is perhaps the most critical question in our industry, because virtual networking is a foundation for not only operator service initiatives like NFV, but also the foundation of cloud-native applications. You’d think, given this, that we would have nailed down the characteristics of virtual…
One of the interesting questions raised during my recent enterprise Q&A related to the adoption of cloud-native technology for traditional business applications. An enterprise who’d gone unusually far in assessing cloud-native, to the point of starting a small application test, had developers suspend writing code to answer a basic question about architecture. “How does this…
What we need is cloud for the masses. We’ve failed to realize almost all the heady projections about cloud computing, not because cloud computing couldn’t have met them, but because we couldn’t meet cloud computing on a reasonable footing. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. The most profound thing going on in the cloud today isn’t…