Talking with operators about OSS/BSS is interesting, and I’ve blogged about operator views on the topic before. The discussions, combined with my own long exposure to the topic, have also given me my own perspective, enriched by recent deep-dive discussions. This is my view of where we are in OSS/BSS modernization, and what might make…
Do we need another online tech news site? That’s an interesting question given the fact that the founder of Politico is about to announce another venture, Protocol, which is just that. The press release says that “Great media companies are sharply focused on communities and the ideas that bind them. POLITICO successfully captured the influential…
Operators have told me a lot about cloud-native, probably because I’ve blogged a lot on the topic and written about it for other software-centric online publications. Since cloud-native is the number one priority emerging from operators’ fall planning cycles, I think it’s interesting to look at some of the questions I had for operators, and…
No business has ever been saved by an acronym. No enduring market has ever been built on an acronym alone. That’s all true, but you’d never know it by looking around in the networking industry. We were “saved” by SDN, and then by NFV, and maybe by ZTA, and now we’re being pulled out of…
If networking turns to an open model, with open-source software and white-box hardware, can today’s network vendors survive? Sure, but not in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. If you’re a big predator in a shrinking habitat, you can shrink to match the food supply (evolutionarily speaking, of course), you can learn to eat…
If NFV has a problem, then VMware thinks (or hopes) it has the solution. The company just announced a technology preview called “Project Maestro”, aimed squarely at breaking an NFV logjam that’s caused in part by the problems with integration and onboarding. This could be really big, or really dumb, and frankly I’m having some…
Maybe we should say that everything old was renamed again, or perhaps that all the old names were given to new things. Scott Raynovich’s piece in Fierce Telecom makes that point; SDN and NFV won’t die but just rise as different (perhaps totally different) concepts under the same name. He also says SD-WAN is the…
The fall technology planning cycle for operators is now ending, and the input I’m getting on the results is surely interesting and possibly dire. One thing is very clear; “transformation” hasn’t progressed much, and so operators overall are curtailing capital spending. Equipment vendors are going to have to face up to a basic truth, which…
Could we be missing a big requirement in zero touch? In a recent conversation I had with a Tier Two operations executive, this question came up, and I think it’s a fair one. It also illustrates that the world of telcos is more varied than we’d think. Nearly all the emphasis on zero-touch service lifecycle…
Should we break up big tech? That’s a question that’s being asked both politically and by tech companies themselves. A thoughtful article on the topic raises some good points, but I think there are both useful amplifications of those points the article makes, and some points that it doesn’t make that need to be considered….