What’s the biggest tech challenge, according to enterprises? Multiplicity. We have too many tech things, too many tech administration tasks, too many product types, too many layers of functionality. Who’s at fault? Enterprises admit that they are largely responsible. Is anything being done about it? Sort of. Management, in particular, feels that it’s buried in…
What’s going on in the cloud? That’s been a question for over a decade, not so much because we’ve not been able to answer it, as because the answer seems to be constantly changing. There is a lot of change in the cloud, as enterprises and even cloud providers tell me, but there’s also a…
One of my favorite tech cartoons goes back many decades, to an era where it was common to relate compute power to what might be called “mathematician years”. You’d say “this computer can do in an hour what a hundred mathematicians a decade to do”. In this cartoon, a man comes home, tosses his briefcase…
How much of our current capex starvation is due to having nothing worthwhile to buy? What role does or should innovation play in product/service evolution? Why are startups and VCs failing to move new things, as we’ve always expected them to? Even some of the best VCs seem to have issues. Now, we’re hearing that…
Could there be good news for telcos staggering under declining profit pressure? NVIDIA wants to come to their rescue! Of course so does everyone else, and so far “rescue” seems to consist of wanting telcos to spend on the rescuers’ products without any real proof it will help. The question is whether NVIDIA is any…
Let’s go beyond a “Tale of Two Cities” to a “Tale of Three Operators”. AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon all reported their numbers for the last quarter, and there was some interesting stuff to be learned, mostly by comparing results and delving into how the findings reflect on operators and tech overall. Fierce Network did a…
What is “strategic influence”, how does it impact buyers and sellers, and what do trends in it mean for the tech market? For decades, I’ve worked to model market behavior as a means of providing another data point to surveys, which present a multitude of issues if you rely on them completely. One thing that’s…
Is networking heading into a software-first period? Should it be? There are areas on this topic where enterprises and operators agree, areas where those two groups disagree, and areas where there’s more or less agreement within each group. Is there any conclusions to be had from this disorder? Let’s see. Let’s start with some numbers….
We all understand the concept of a secret agenda. Most of us understand that the term has a kind of intrinsic taint about it, a notion that the goal is to mislead. Well, we’re right to be cynical, but at the same time we’d all better hope that network vendors have one of those cynically…
In this earlier blog, I talked about the challenges of the emerging “Telco as a Platform” concept, and referenced a TelecomTV story on their summit on the topic. That story included a poll on the question “What are the main benefits to network operators of a Telco as a Platform strategy?. The poll cited seven…