Huawei is certainly on a roll. It reported revenues up 40% in the latest quarter, up from a 30% gain the quarter before, and that’s certainly the best in the whole industry. At a time when rival Ericsson is shedding its CEO and rivals Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia are merging for efficiency, Huawei seems to be … Continue reading How Huawei’s Growth Highlights an Industry Challenge
From almost the first meeting of the NFV Industry Specification Group, there’s been a tension between NFV and the cloud. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are almost indistinguishable from application components in the cloud, and so platforms like OpenStack or Docker and tools like vSwitches and DevOps could all be considered as elements of NFV implementation. … Continue reading Building On the Natural Cloud-to-NFV Symbiosis
One of the useful trends in network services these days is the trend to retreat from the technology basis for a service and focus on the retail attributes. You can see this in announcements from operators that they’re supporting “network-as-a-service” or “self-service”, but in fact these same trends are a critical part of the “virtual … Continue reading Unraveling Our NaaS Options
What operators want most from their next-gen infrastructure (whether SDN or NFV or the cloud) is openness. They feel, with some justification, that equipment vendors want to lock them in and force them down migration paths that help the vendor and compromise operator goals. Networks in the past, built on long-established standards that defined the … Continue reading Achieving Openness in NFV
Software-defined WAN is one of those terms that’s vague enough to be applicable to a lot of things, but the core reality is a fairly classic “overlay model” of networking. An overlay network is a layer on top of the “network protocol” of a real network, an overlay that provides the connectivity service to the … Continue reading SD-WAN’s Potential as a Game-Changer is Growing
From the first, it was (or should have been) clear that NFV was a cloud application. Despite this, we aren’t seeing what should then have been clear signs of technologies and concepts migrating from the cloud space into NFV. One obvious example is TOSCA, the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications, which has … Continue reading Should NFV Adopt “Infrastructure as Code” from the Cloud?
Microsoft announced it was acquiring business social network giant LinkedIn and the Street took that as positive for LinkedIn and negative for Microsoft. There are a lot of ways of looking at the deal, including that Microsoft like Verizon wants a piece of the OTT and advertising-sponsored service market. It seems more likely that there’s … Continue reading What Microsoft’s LinkedIn Deal Could Mean
All too often in technology, we see concepts with real possibilities go stupid on us. Lately many of the key concepts have doubled down on stupidness, departing so far from relevant market benefits that there’s little hope of success. IoT, probably the most hyped of all technology concepts in recent times, has surely had its … Continue reading IoT is Creeping Toward a Logical Value Proposition!
Some examples of the operator architecture for SDN and NFV networks have been out for a couple weeks or more. We’re now starting to hear more about vendor changes and even a bit more about the conditions in the marketplace. I’ve certainly been hearing plenty, and so I want to provide a status report. It … Continue reading Where Are We in SDN/NFV Evolution?
I had an opportunity this week to look over some material from Netcracker on their notion of a “digital service provider”, part of the documentation that relates to their Agile Virtualization Platform concept. I also reviewed what was available on the technology and architecture of AVP. I find the technology fascinating and the research and … Continue reading Netcracker’s AVP: Is This the Right Approach to SDN and NFV?