Since it’s the Monday before an SDN/NFV show, Columbus Day in the US, and a day when there’ll likely be no earnings announcements or much news, we can take a look at a few items that didn’t make the “news” cut last week. It’s not that they don’t show something interesting as much as something else may have showed it better.
Juniper and NSN’s expanding partnership in mobile is one such thing, and I noted it in passing last week. One reason why it’s not a lead item is that Juniper has been struggling to get a mobile position that did anything tangible for years now. MobileNext was finally shelved, and you can be pretty sure that the NSN expansion is a direct result. No news there.
Where something interesting might come in is that the NSN alliance itself is either an attractive billboard or a placeholder. Juniper is about the only metro player that NSN could work with unless it wanted to pull its competitors into deals. I don’t think that the arrangement is going to raise sales for either company if that’s as far as it goes, because I think the two were likely supporting common interests here in any case.
But where could it go that’s further? The only logical step forward is for Juniper to supply “Liquid” metro/core in the same sense that NSN has been touting it. That would mean a clear turning of Juniper R&D and positioning to support the Liquid concept fully. In turn, that would mean that NSN and Juniper would have to agree on critical things like the cloud, SDN, and NFV. I don’t get the sense that the two companies see any of those technologies in the same way, or that their thinking is converging. It could, of course, but not yet.
The biggest question is whether Juniper would be willing to submerge its positioning in NSN’s Liquid theme. On one hand, Juniper’s positioning has ranged from inane to vacuous recently so it’s not much of a loss. On the other, Juniper has very significant technical strengths that it could leverage if a new CEO provides the company with a more strategic set of marching orders. So what this may come down to is whether NSN and Juniper would become one, which would mean Nokia would have to merge with or buy Juniper. At the current Juniper price levels, I think Nokia’s financial team would blanch at the thought, which would mean that Juniper would have to buy NSN out of Nokia. Leaving Nokia, I think it’s fair to say, nothing. So it’s really hard for me to see how this plays out.
Financial analysts think that Nokia is more likely to buy Alcatel-Lucent’s wireless business, which would make a lot of sense for Nokia but might create some issues for Alcatel-Lucent. It’s not that the RAN and IMS are killer opportunities, though. They’re deal-introducers, but there could be other better ones like the cloud, SDN, and NFV. Alcatel-Lucent, after all, has not only the sole public offering from a major vendor in the NFV space, it’s actually a nice concept with the tie I think is essential—the tie to the cloud.
Another thing I’m struggling with is this whole gigabit Internet thing. Google Fiber is supposed to be driving the whole industry to gigabit levels. This, despite two key points. First, customers in multi-tier-by-speed service areas cluster at the lowest speed and the cheapest service. Second, there is little relationship between Internet access speed and service quality overall once you get above about 15 Mbps. Yes, some households will stress access with multiple streams of video, etc, but if you fix access congestion you tend to roll the problem deeper into the aggregation network. If you think that we’re going to get superInternet at next to no price increase, dream on. This is more of that “attractive billboard” stuff, or something like the political posturing we’re seeing all too much of here in the US. You can clock an interface at any speed the media is capable of, but how many home networks could even deliver a gig? How many devices could absorb it? In any event, all this would do is further commoditize bits if it were made real, and what operators are trying to do is monetize services.
The obvious questions in the services area are which services and how are they deployed. What’s inside all the cloud, SDN, and NFV hype today is the realization (yes, in a fuzzy way just like politicians realize truth in a fuzzy way) that mobile and the cloud are combining to create a future where extemporaneous demand will drive the market for contextual solutions to contextual problems. A mobile user wants instant gratification because if there’s a delay they’ve walked or driven away from the stimulus. “Where do I turn here?” is meaningful as a question if the “here” isn’t five blocks back by the time a response is available. Answers and solutions aren’t the same thing; the former is “information” and the latter is “contextual information”. We are going to shift all of online services to contextual responses because we’re shifting all of the demand to mobile.
A less-obvious question here is whether there’s a kind of contextual app family that has to develop to optimally couple users with resources. We know what a cloud looks like, how software defines networks (we just don’t bother to relate these realities to near-term product launches because it’s too hard to monetize). Do we know what contextual apps are or if we need them? Pertino, who launched a distributed-services vision out of a remote access platform, has equated NFV in the network with similar agility at the service-agent level, but the connection isn’t as tight or elegant as it could be. I’d like to see them, and others, explore the question that we really have to ask here, which is whether all the technology revolutions inside the infrastructure of the future have to marry a revolution on the outside.