Month: August 2025| andoverintel.com
When you ask enterprises about the important issues of application hosting, one of the top items on their list is always governance. Data security and sovereignty are critical to businesses, and that truth impacts everything about IT and networking from project conception to deployment and use. Of 477 enterprises who offered me spontaneous views on...| Andover Intel
My recent blogs on telecom opex provoked some interesting interactions with telcos, and in particular with a group of 22 who engaged me in a bit of a dialog. They were particularly focused on the point that there was an opportunity for AI to address the “business” process of telcos, not the “network” process. As...| Andover Intel
Elon Musk isn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal pundit, particularly for AI topics, but sometimes he says something that has a kernel of merit, or is at least worthy of examining. Take this comment on X, for example: “Devices will just be edge nodes for AI inference, as bandwidth limitations prevent everything being done server-side.”...| Andover Intel
Omdia has produces another very useful report, this one on telecom opex, and I think there are some insights we can draw from it, especially if I tie in what I hear from the telcos themselves. In particular, I think there are some important lessons regarding telco use of AI. There’s a useful analysis of...| Andover Intel
Suppose the telcos were to commit to deploying an edge/IoT service set. Suppose their goal was to do only as little in the application domain as they could, meaning they wanted an IoT “utility” service. What would, or should, it look like? Since I’d done a blog on how edge/IoT might be the only way...| Andover Intel
Several articles (like THIS) have noted that generative AI use dipped sharply in early June as schools closed out for the summer. Most take either the stand that this shows kids cheating on homework is a major user of AI, some that it shows that kids need to integrate AI more into their lives. What...| Andover Intel
Can broadband networks be made both populist and profitable? What constraints on technology and capability exist in meeting that goal? Obviously this is one of those things that require a balance between the characteristics of a service and the cost, that balance being impacted by the distribution of the service users and thus the efficiency...| Andover Intel
The cost of network infrastructure, both capex and opex, directly relates to the architectural policies established in the deployment of network elements. Operators agree with an obvious point, which is that you can reduce both if you reduce the number of devices in the network. They also agree that you can “flatten” a network to...| Andover Intel
Could it be that the telcos made a fatal mistake back in the 1990s? Could their ability to continue to operate in the future without some form of subsidization or return to public utility status now depend on an almost-impossible retro-decision? Is it already too late to get things right, because they (and we in the market) have had it all wrong for decades? A decent number of enterprise network experts think this is all true.| Andover Intel
Month: May 2025| andoverintel.com
How do companies justify tech projects? That’s a question that often comes up in stories, social media, and other forums. There are a lot of views, because the topic isn’t exactly cut and dried, and because different constituencies have different answers; vendors and users, meaning sellers and buyers, investors and employees, and so forth. I’ve...| Andover Intel
The recent Starlink service outage has raised yet again the issue of software failures in network outages. While over 80% of enterprises and slightly under two-thirds of operators say the largest source of outage-minutes in their networks is human error, most of these will admit that there’s an underlying question of whether software should have prevented or at least mitigated it. In any case, most of those who don’t cite human error cite software/firmware problems as their prime outage s...| Andover Intel
Month: July 2025| andoverintel.com
The biggest problem with AI agents, say enterprises, is that all you can easily find about them is trivial and wrong. Yes, it’s possible to infer some useful truths from basic agentic comments online, but the details that a savvy planner would need to make agent decisions and deployments is missing. One AI type told me “There are agentic AI myths, and agentic AI misses.” Let’s take a look at both to try to set the record straight.| Andover Intel
One of the hot topics in telecom these days is the role AI could play in managing opex. I blogged about this a bit recently, and got some LinkedIn comments. The operative presumption is that telecom could cut jobs through the use of AI, and Light Reading said that “The combined workforce of the 20 operators tracked by Light Reading shrank by another 52,000 jobs or 4% last year, and AI is only just getting started.” Truth is that job-cutting at telcos is hardly new, and AI hasn’t played ...| Andover Intel
A bit ago, I commented on a LinkedIn post that asked whether we are repeating, with AI agents, the mistakes of NFV. My comment was “The issues here are deeper, I think. The essential problem with NFV was that operations is inherently an event-driven, stateful, process and the architecture mandated by the NFV ISG wasn’t that. Agentic AI is in a sense a component in an application, and in order to frame its architecture you have to decide what the overall application model is. I think that ...| Andover Intel
Here’s an important truth for you; for telcos, AI is dangerous. And no, it’s not the security issues or hallucinations, or the fact that the technology is expensive, it’s that the “promise of AI” is, for telcos, largely a trap. Few, if any, of the initiatives that are promoted for the telco community have any real chance of making a substantial difference to telco profits, and that’s what they need to be focusing on. AI is distracting them.| Andover Intel
Having spent last week on the network operator/telco space, it’s time to take a look at the enterprise side, and in particular the trends and developments in cloud computing and AI. Wall Street’s survey of CIOs shows that cloud spending growth slowed significantly so far this year, perhaps to a third of last year’s rate (which itself was slower than the year before). Enterprise comments (from 429 this year so far) confirm this, and also confirm that so far Microsoft seems to be leading ...| Andover Intel
The notion of AI agents is just the latest in the ongoing wash-with-AI process, but as usual there’s a grain of truth in all the nonsense. There are, to be sure, negative views on AI agents, but there are also some thoughtful pieces that, while they are likely victims of the normal survey bias problems, show a lot of enterprise interest. Some comments correspond to what enterprises tell me, but I have some different impressions of the space overall after my own chats.| Andover Intel
Networking is changing, and in every changing market the biggest pressure is applied to the vendors. You can’t sell the same old stuff when the buyer is moving on, and they surely are. There are some pressures that we could classify as systemic, meaning they don’t originate from a single thing but rather from gradual tectonic movements, and others that are reactive, meaning they come about from a single factor. We have both, and that will impact network buyers and, of course, vendors.| Andover Intel
Month: April 2025| andoverintel.com
The DoJ finally, after making a totally nonsensical objection to the HPE/Juniper deal, followed up with a somewhat compensating irrelevant settlement deal, leaving things just about where they’d been before the whole mess began. But, of course, where that might be in an overall market sense is still up in the air.| Andover Intel
Remember the old film “Play Misty for Me”? Well, Juniper may be revising it to “Play Mist for Sales”, at least to channel players. In a June CRN article, their head of partner programs says “Our Mist AI native networking platform—it’s that gateway into predictable as-a-service growth because that for me is the future and what customers are looking for, and our technology just plays so well into that.” They may be right.| Andover Intel
After I posted some comments on how I’d do 6G, as a software-architect type, I got a LinkedIn request and some operator requests via our user-only mailbox, to expand on the details, so here goes, along with a diagram.| Andover Intel
Month: June 2025| andoverintel.com
If you read my blog yesterday, you know my views on the importance of making telecom software into hosted functions. You might then think that the Ericsson/Google pact, covered by Light Reading, is proof this is already happening. A few have asked me about this, but I respectfully disagree with the “already done” theories.| Andover Intel
I’ve been hearing a lot about telco 6G, and Nokia has published a blog on the recent advances in 6G formulation and the schedule of activity. The first market rollouts are scheduled in 2030, and in any world but telecom standards that would be more than enough time to suggest major changes be made. Obviously, we’re in the standards world with 6G, though, and so I think it’s likely too late to see any significant shifts. The question is what that lack of reconsideration might mean to the...| Andover Intel
Omdia publishes some nice research, and I found a recent piece, “Telco Software Evolution Survey—2025” to have some interesting implications I’d like to develop. I agree with the key points on the factors buyers consider most, but I’ve had many comments on OSS/BSS systems that I’d like to roll in with the buyer-interest material to get a line on the direction telcos are heading with OSS/BSS, and in general. The comments I draw from the report come from the LinkedIn figure; the rep...| Andover Intel
What is a “private cloud”? I looked at enterprise views on this last year, so it’s a topic that’s hardly new. Still, there are new developments, as shown by the most recent references to Broadcom’s success with VMware. The classic definition isn’t helpful; a dedicated cloud environment exclusive to a single company. Enterprises themselves seem to see it from a number of different angles, and their views are shifting enough to justify taking another look at the topic. Since my last...| Andover Intel
I’ve never held a view that private 5G would be an enormous opportunity for vendors, cloud providers, or operators, and I still don’t. I do believe, though, that private 5G may be extremely important to all these groups, and to unlocking additional IT and network spending and investment. Enterprises are seeing the issue more clearly now, and that gives me more ammunition to support this position, and more clarity on the issues we face in realizing both private 5G and what it could lead to.| Andover Intel
One of the most important trends in network equipment is the increased availability of “merchant silicon”, chips designed to implement common network functions such as switching, routing, and route determination. It is this development that has led to the increased interest in “white box” or open-model technology in networks. While there are several vendors who offer these chips, Broadcom has been a market leader, and they have recently released a new behemoth in their Tomahawk 6 swit...| Andover Intel
Cloud computing has surely been transformational, but it also surely contends with AI as the leader in the tech-hype category. What gives the cloud the edge, perhaps, in this cynical race is the endurance of the hype. Year after year we heard about how everything was moving to the cloud. Now we hear that everything, or most stuff at least, is being repatriated. Broadcom said in a recent “private cloud report” that 69% of enterprises are considering repatriating some cloud apps. My own dat...| Andover Intel
A recent Light Reading story on the topic of the “cloud-native” movement of telcos includes some interesting comments from telcos themselves. One was “It’s a long journey, and we have very important milestones in front of us.” But is it a long journey, what are the critical milestones, who’s responsible for meeting them, and is the journey even necessary? Let’s see.| Andover Intel
I took some time from my time off last week to do some modeling on the way AI could impact telcos. There are, according to my model, some verticals that have extraordinary potential to gain from AI adoption. Is telecom one of them? Let’s see what I found, starting first with some foundation points.| Andover Intel
Another question that my series of blogs on telecom standards raised with telcos themselves is “Why couldn’t NFV have fixed these problems?” On the surface, the concept of virtualizing network functions, which is what I advocated in THIS blog, would seem to be what NFV aimed to do. So why didn’t it work?| Andover Intel
Mainframes, monoliths, hybrid cloud, AI…all these are terms that we kick around, but one company, IBM, embodies them all in a way that no other does. IBM is also doing pretty darn well these days. In the last 6 months, it’s stock has gone up over 20%, and in the last year over 50%. Is there a relationship between the four tech terms I opened with and IBM’s success? Can answering that offer us any insight into the future of computing and even networking? Could their recent announcement o...| Andover Intel
What, if anything, can we say about the value of AI to network operators, to telcos in particular? Is it transformational, justified, or simply applicable? Are there any missions that fall clearly into the “gain” category? I’ve dug through almost 200 comments made by operators on the topic, and this is what I’ve found.| Andover Intel
Many of you who read my blog know that Andover Intel has a users-only email link and we encourage consumers of technology to comment, ask questions, debate, or whatever with complete confidentiality. My blogs on standards in general and 6G in particular generated emails from 51 of 88 operators who have commented, as users, and that’s the highest level of response so far.| Andover Intel
OK, let’s face facts. The whole of telecom standards is broken, and something radical is needed to fix it. You only have to read the story of 5G, and reflect on past initiatives like frame relay and ATM, or the IPsphere concept, or Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to see how badly the industry is served by telecom standards. But we’ve been stuck in the process for decades, and that demonstrates how difficult it is to change things there. Do we know what needs to change, what barriers...| Andover Intel
There are clearly a lot of things going on in the telecom space. For well over a decade, operators have been experiencing erosion in revenue per bit. Some, particularly in areas like the EU where competition is fierce, have sought subsidies from big-tech firms to compensate for the traffic they add, traffic users themselves are unwilling to pay for. Neutrality rules change in the political winds. Businesses, under pressure to do more with less, are looking for ways to replace the costly busin...| Andover Intel
Enterprises, asked what the relevant 6G features could be, will say “low latency” almost 3:1 over all other options combined. But why is latency relevant? The answer, interestingly, of almost half those who cite it reduces to “I don’t really know”. The rest say that it would be relevant to promote the availability of hosted edge computing. OK, but would it? Let’s take a look.| Andover Intel
There has, for years, been a potential for the cloud providers’ networks to create competition for enterprise networks based on MPLS VPNs. I noted in an earlier blog that enterprises were seriously looking at reducing their WAN costs by using SD-WAN and/or SASE. This obviously generated an opportunity for cloud providers to offer WAN services, and also for someone to offer multi-cloud interconnect. Maybe it also offers more, as Fierce Network suggests.| Andover Intel
In my blog yesterday about the future of operator network services and infrastructure, I mentioned the possibility (well, maybe “hope” would be more accurate) that the 6G initiatives might address some issues in a useful way. Since we’re at least five years from a solid idea of what 6G is going to do (we might get an idea of what it’s targeted at in three years, but not how it will deploy), can we even see a glimmer of direction? I got some views from both operators and vendors, and (...| Andover Intel
I went back over some of my own writing a decade or two ago, and it made me wonder how much we could hope to uncover about the future of network infrastructure for service providers a decade or more from now. Everyone loves transformations; they generate interest for us and clicks for publications and advertisers. Can we expect one?| andoverintel.com
What network models are enterprises looking at for the future? How might the network of 2028 differ from that of 2025? I got some information from 294 enterprises that offer some answers to these questions, but they also point out that there are many different drivers operating on networks over the next three years, and these drivers impact enterprises based on things like the vertical market they’re part of, the size of the company and their office sites, and the unit value of labor and na...| Andover Intel
One of the biggest, and yet least-recognized, challenges enterprises face in software deployment these days is addressing non-transactional models of application workflow. We’ve spent decades understanding and populizing online transaction processing (OLTP), in large part because for decades that’s the only kind of application you found at the core of businesses. That’s changing today, in part because we’re changing what enterprises do with applications (and through them, with their w...| Andover Intel
Enterprises have always managed their networks, but just how that’s done has always had its own twists and turns. The common thinking is expressed by the FCAPS acronym, meaning fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security, and this is what we could call the “prescriptive” thinking. But enterprises themselves seem to recognize some higher-level issues, mostly relating to the relationship between QoS, QoE, and “fault”.| Andover Intel
We’re still waiting for movement by someone on DoJ’s opposition to the HPE/Juniper deal. Meanwhile, the two companies, their customers, and their competitors are all gaming out the results of the possible outcomes. That’s difficult because we can’t be sure why HPE or Juniper wanted the deal in the first place.| Andover Intel
Here’s a seemingly obvious truth for you; there’s no such thing as an infinite TAM. Any market can be saturated, and as saturation approaches all markets can expect to see a slowdown in growth rate. So it is with wireline broadband in general, and cable broadband in the US in particular, according to a Light Reading piece. The thing that I find interesting about these discussions is that people are happy to talk about the trend and seemingly reluctant to accept the cause. Is increased com...| Andover Intel
I had an interesting conversation with an AI expert from a major AI company, and if I add it to some parallel points from enterprise conversations on AI, I think it leads to some insights into what AI might (or might not) contribute to boosting technology value, and spending.| Andover Intel
One of the problems with hyped technologies is excessive breadth. Hype is a form of mass hysteria, and to achieve it you need masses, which means you tend to generalize to increase the chances a given theme will intercept interest profiles and get clicks. The problem is that there’s often a specialized piece of a hyped technology evolution that could really be important, but is missed because of its very specificity. So it is with Nvidia’s CES position and its Cosmos world foundation models.| Andover Intel
Could the cloud really become the network? That’s a question that many (including me) have asked over the last decade. When the view was “everything is moving to the cloud”, that would be an almost-inevitable outcome except for broadband access, but since I’ve rejected that universal-cloud theory from the first, and since I’ve reported that enterprises have also rejected it, the question is whether cloud attitude shifts would alter the idea that networking, at least in a WAN sense, ...| Andover Intel
Andrew Lloyd Weber has a great line that describes tech these days. In the form I’ve heard it performed, it goes “You talk of truth? Is truth unchanging law? We all have truths—are mine the same as yours?” Leaving the question of whether truth is unchanging to philosophers, consider the next point, which is the inherent subjectivism of truth. Fact is, we all see things differently. Some of that bias is emotional, some is based on the fact that we all have different knowledge sets, and...| Andover Intel
One early point of application for AI in general, and AI agents in particular, is network/IT operations. In the last six months, 154 enterprises have told me their own interest in this area has increased dramatically, and the number who have adopted or say they will adopt AI in that role has doubled. What’s behind this? There clearly has to be some specific mission or missions driving the new interest in AIops. Those 154 enterprise can shed some light on the matter.| Andover Intel
If a fusion of AI and digital twins is at least a convenient abstraction to use describing the relationship, does a metaverse figure in? If so, how? Could it be that what I’ve called the “metaverse of things” or MoT, is what the AI/digital-twin fusion is, and if not, what is MoT in this picture? Very few enterprises from my recent sample of 76 had any comment on these points, but these early views are important.| Andover Intel
“No responsible CEO is going to turn a company over to AI, period.” That’s surely emphatic, and also the comment an enterprise CEO sent me over the last weekend. Others, lower down in the same enterprise and in other ones, were commenting on my blogs on “agent AI” and why enterprises had been advocating something of that nature, even before the technology was being discussed. Now, with the concept of agents out in the open, more and more enterprise IT planners are seeing the potential.| Andover Intel
https://andoverintel.com| andoverintel.com
What’s more important to the future of tech, digital twins or AI? If you have to pick only one thing, I’d argue that the digital twin would win, because the future of tech depends on more real-time, real-world, automation and lifestyle augmentation. Digital twins that model the real world seem inescapable in that mission, and in fact are already being adopted there. But AI can also play a role, and as I noted in an earlier blog HERE, companies like NVIDIA are seeing the link, and the conn...| Andover Intel
We’ve all heard the phrase “Too little, too late”, and surely applied to telcos, but I want to propose another seemingly contradictory phrase to describe their current state. It’s “Too late, too little”.| Andover Intel
It used to be that we’d look at tech purchases in terms of what buyers like. We may now be entering a period when what matters is what they hate. A big part of this attitude adjustment relates to the shift of tech purchases from new projects to maintenance budgets, and another part is due to increased difficulty buyers of tech experience in getting and retaining skilled workers. Let’s look at how this shift is impacting both enterprises and network operators.| Andover Intel
OK, DeepSeek happened. OK, it convulsed stocks. That was then, this is now. If the DeepSeek announcement was an earthquake on Wall Street, where will the rubble fall hardest, and what might be left in a condition not only better than expected but better than before DeepSeek came along? Those are the questions we’ll look at today.| Andover Intel
Well, China rattled investors in AI with its DeepSeek model. NASDAQ futures were down over 800 points at one point I saw on Monday, and of course this is surely do to short-selling by hedge funds. But you don’t short a market that’s not at least a bit over-bought, meaning that a lot of Street professionals thought there was a good chance that AI was over-hyped. That may be why there’s a move afoot to transition from “generative AI” stories to “agentic” and “inference” AI. Th...| Andover Intel
For many, the most important question for 2025 is the fate of the cloud. Last year we saw what was perhaps the very first clear dose of cloud skepticism, so will that continue or accelerate in 2025? If so, what happens to IT in general and the cloud in particular? If not, what will reverse the skepticism of last year, and what will develop from it? There are a lot of thoughts floating around on all of this, particularly on Wall Street, but they’re not showing a coherent picture. Can we dig ...| Andover Intel
What do enterprises think their network should be? I can’t say that I get much in the way of explicit comments on this, other than the expected toss-offs like “cheap”, “reliable”, and “secure”. Few enterprises really think about how network technology should evolve, and fewer offer spontaneous comments on the topic. However, I’ve been looking over the 2023-2024 enterprise tech comments I’ve gotten, and I propose there may be an implicit view lurking on the network of the fut...| Andover Intel
There are a lot of stories coming out on whether the DoJ’s decision to try to block the HPE/Juniper deal ends up helping Cisco (HERE and HERE, for example), and Juniper’s CEO has also made that comment. The sense of the view is that if blocking the merger helps the current dominant player, how can the merger be anti-competitive? In order to know whether the claim is true, we have to look at how the success of the merger would hurt Cisco, and whether that hurt is a result of the merger its...| Andover Intel