Why did Dell and VMware beat Street estimates, while HPE and IBM fell short? The companies themselves are clearly interested in answering that question. Investors obviously have an interest in this question, but anyone in tech should be interested too, because the answer may a signal on future technology direction. It’s not difficult to see…
Cisco may have declared itself with regard to its growth and cloud strategy. Thursday late, they announced they’re going to acquire ThousandEyes, a company with a big name in “experience monitoring”, meaning quality of experience (QoE). Monitoring, particularly monitoring related to QoE, has good potential to serve as the centerpiece of an “ecosystem”, something that…
What is the value of hosted routing instances? This is a question that’s been asked for a full decade now, and the view of operators has shifted back and forth. It’s also true that when operator technology planners are asked, they often give a knee-jerk answer and take it back on consideration. Finally, many are…
I blogged yesterday about vendor differentiation in an open-model network, and closed with the point that a higher virtual layer might offer the only place where “connectivity networking” could find the features and opportunities vendors needed. SD-WAN, I pointed out, was an example of an exploitation of that higher virtual layer, but one that’s not…
How do you compete in an open-device future? It seems obvious that we’re not only headed in that direction, in some market areas we’re already on the doorstep. Vendors are not going to lie down with a rose on their chest, they’ll try to fight, but how will they do that? There are a number…
There is no question that videoconferencing tools have saved companies from a pandemic lockdown crisis. There’s little question that familiarity with the tools will promote their use in the future, even when there’s no pandemic to drive change. They may indeed replace voice calls for many business interactions, even those involving only two parties. We’ve…
Google wants to be your babysitter? That’s a pretty interesting tag line, and one that Protocol has offered us. According to their piece, parent Alphabet has filed a patent in the space. “Not that many of us are leaving home much, but in that distant future when the world returns to normal, Google wants to…
A tale of two announcements; that’s a nice literary play on my blog topic. Cisco announced its earnings, and it’s always a useful barometer on telco spending trends. In addition, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Metaswitch, and that seems to me to decide the question of how its recent Azure Edge Zone stuff should be…
Openness is good, right? We need open-source software. We need open APIs, open standards, and open-model networking. OK, let’s agree to agree on those points. The question is how exactly does openness come about, and particularly in the network space. A collateral question is whether there are degrees of success, and if there is, the…
Lifecycle automation is all about handling events with automated processes. Event interpretation has to be contextual, which means that this process of event-handling needs to include a recognition of specific contexts or states, so that events are properly interpreted. There are advantages of state/event tables over policies in controlling event-handling in lifecycle automation, at least…