Most would agree NFV has not met expectations. I’ve blogged about the things I believe are the issues, and the feedback I got from operators on those blogs has included operators’ own views on the subject. They’re not always congruent with my own (in some cases they’re almost contrary), but they are always interesting, given…
Cisco’s decision to buy Acacia has drawn praise and some pans from Street analysts worried about what the deal will do to Acacia’s sale to Cisco’s competitors. There are reasons for the deal, I think, that don’t seem to be coming out in the media, and in some ways, it seems to buck a trend…
One of the most profound benefits of the cloud is the elasticity or scalability that virtualization of hosting resources can create. Think of it as having a computer whose power expands and contracts with the level of presented work and you’ll get the idea. The problem is that this kind of scalability isn’t a natural…
In this second of my pieces on the things we’re forgetting in carrier cloud, NFV, and lifecycle automation, I want to look at the issue of tenancy. You may have noticed that VNFs, and the NFV processes in general, tend to be focused on single-tenant services. Virtual CPE (vCPE), the current leader in VNF popularity,…
It should be obvious that carrier cloud needs a network. Perhaps it is, but if so there are plenty of network operators who haven’t really considered what that network would be, where they’d get it, or how the choice might impact their overall success in transformation. We’ve come a long way down the line of…
There is no question that disorder is hard to manage. Thus, it might seem reasonable to applaud the recent story that the GSMA is working to bring some order to the “Wild West” of NFVi, meaning NFV infrastructure. Look deeper, though, and you’ll find that disorder should have been the goal of NFV all along,…
Transformation is surely the key topic for telco executives, and that’s been true for over a decade. I had a series of interesting discussions with telcos over the last three months, hoping to gain some clarity on the nature of their transformation plans. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that there was little…
With the exception of Cisco, none of the network equipment vendors can market themselves out of a paper bag. Juniper, perhaps, is even a bit worse than average. Their positioning of their Mist acquisition has been murky, but they’re apparently working to refine it now. The question is whether there is a real value proposition…
One of the many concepts the cloud has brought us is the “single source of truth”, the idea behind the repository-centric operations vision called “GitOps”. Some vendors, like Ciena, have recently been promoting a transformation model based on collecting data from operations systems and management systems into a repository. This raises the question of whether…
I want to take up federation again, extending the federation approach of Google’s Anthos to the service provider space, where federation is surely needed. I’ve said many times that the cloud initiatives we’re seeing are addressing many of the things that operator standards for advanced services and hosted features should have addressed. The question now…