We have no shortage of orchestration activity in standards groups, and the MEF has redoubled its own Life Cycle Orchestration (LSO) efforts with its new MEF 3.0 announcement. The overall approach is sound at the technical level, meaning that it addresses things like the issues of “federation” of service elements across provider boundaries, but it … Continue reading MEF 3.0: Progress but not Revolution
The notion of stateless microservices for networking and the cloud is hardly new. I introduced some of the broad points on state in my blog last week, but the notion is much older. Twitter pioneered the concepts, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all deployed web services to support the model, which is aimed at … Continue reading Does Nokia’s AirGile Advance Stateless Event-Based VNFs?
You might be wondering whether perhaps NFV is getting a second wind. The fact that Verizon is looking at adopting ONAP, whose key piece is rival AT&T’s ECOMP, is a data point. Amdocs’ ONAP-based NFV strategy is another. Certainly there is still interest among many operators in making NFV work, but we still have two … Continue reading Exploiting the New Attention NFV is Getting
One of the issues that should be driving the fall operator planning cycle, carrier cloud, isn’t making a really strong appearance so far. Those of you who’ve read my blog on what is likely to be a big planning focus no doubt saw that carrier cloud wasn’t on the list. Many would find this a … Continue reading Can the Drivers of Carrier Cloud Converge on a Common Cloud Vision?
The Street report that ATT is considering the sale of its Digital Life division should have a lot of telco transformation people on edge. This is the division that handles consumer offerings like home security, long seen as the basis for any shift of a network operator into non-connection services. Is it not working? Worse, … Continue reading Does AT&T’s Digital Life Prove There’s No Life in Digital?
According to Light Reading, a senior Ericsson exec doesn’t think that 5G will kickstart telecom spending. Ericsson also issued a profit warning, causing its stock to take a big hit. That this is even a surprise is hard for me to understand, frankly. Telcos have been telling me for years that they couldn’t continue to … Continue reading What Ericsson is Signaling about the Networking Industry
There is little question that change is roiling through the video market. The challenge is figuring out what might be changing, and what it’s changing to. The choices seem fairly clear—we have an OTT-driven video option or a more traditional channelized cable-and-telco-TV or satellite option. We’ve seen growing interest in streaming OTT video services as … Continue reading How Far Might Streaming IP Video Go, and How Would it Get There?
Cisco is arguably the technology powerhouse of networking, not to mention the marketing gorilla and the emerging leader in the efforts of network vendors to broaden their base in response to declining capex. Network functions virtualization (NFV) is arguably the natural fusion of IT and networking, and a logical place for a vendor with broader … Continue reading Does Cisco’s Blog on Pathways to NFV Really Lead Anywhere?
The modern view of a virtual private network is clearly trying to balance the “virtual” part and the “private” part. Private networks based on dedicated per-tenant facilities were the rule up to sometime in the 1980s, when IP VPNs came on the scene and introduced shared-tenant VPNs. Now the VPN space seems to be moving … Continue reading Are We (Finally) on the Verge of Realizing SD-WAN/Overlay Network Benefits?
There seem to be a lot of forces driving, suggesting, or inducing major changes in the networking industry. As indicators, we have mergers at the service provider, equipment vendor, and content provider level, and we have proposed breakups of hardware and software at the equipment level. Another hardware player broke itself to death, selling pieces … Continue reading This Year is the Crossroads for Networking