One of the big and hidden problems with cloud-native and microservices is state. True cloud-native elements should be fully scalable and resilient, and that combination mandates that these elements save nothing within themselves, even the context of a dialog with a user. “State” or “context” is intrinsic to virtually all business applications, including applications designed…
Cisco gave us classic good/bad news in its earnings call. The good was that their guidance for the rest of the year was strong. The bad news was that service provider revenues were down by 13%, and these points were summed up by Light Reading and CNBC . There are a lot of implications to…
I ‘ve mentioned NGOSS Contract many times in prior blogs, and I was somewhat surprised when my latest blog (yesterday) raised questions from readers who were actually TMF members. One was particularly interesting: “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?” The actual question was a big more complicated and interesting, and that was how…
Light Reading sets a lot of the dialog in the industry, and so when they raise a topic it’s important to me, to my clients, and to those who read my blog. An example is this article, citing a discussion at the TMF’s Digital Transformation World event in Nice. The piece recounts operator frustration with…
I mentioned in my Monday blog my mock political debate on “smart versus dumb pipes.” Now it seems that the industry is heading for a reprise of that same issue, which is a good thing because it was never really resolved. The obvious question is whether there are new ideas behind the old question, or…
Standards are not getting great press these days, nor are standards groups. Part of the problem is that open-source seems to be stealing the traditional thunder of standards, and part the fact that standards seem to take forever. That combination can be deadly, and when you think of standards in connection with a hot and…
Light Reading raised an interesting point on MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) in a story today; several, in fact. Along the way, they’re raising some interesting points about 5G, virtualization, and even NFV. It should be clear to many that 5G has become a kind of perceptual on-ramp for a bunch of new technologies, and we…
Divide and conquer is a popular theory, but it’s not always smart. Networks and clouds are both complex ecosystems, not just disconnected sets of products, and so to think about them as products will threaten users’ ability to combine and optimize their usage. Sadly, we live in a world where powerful forces are creating the…
One of the nice things about UFOs is that until they land and present themselves, you can say what you like about them. Abstraction in networking and the cloud is similar in many ways; because an abstraction is a representation, there’s no limit to what one can represent. No limit, perhaps, but a potentially huge…
One of the most important concepts in business is TAM, which most know stands for “total addressable market”. TAM is the problem that Google (Alphabet) faced in its revenue loss early this week, and also the problem Apple confronted the next day. Even though these two tech giants are in different markets, market principles still…