Stephen Speirs

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center Conference in London.   I came out of the conference with some questions I asked and some questions I wish I had asked! So if you are attending the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, USA, this week, here…

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Data Center conference in London.   I attended 3 different sessions on SDN-related topics.  Here are some of my observations from what was a very good conference.  Also, since the Gartner Data Center conference runs this week (w/c 1 December 2014…

OpenStack is gaining increasing industry attention and, while it can deliver huge advantages, some may say it is “hyped”. Although OpenStack has an ever growing range of enthusiastic practitioners and advocates,  as you may be aware, OpenStack is not without its critics – including Gartner – w…

Last week I spent some time at the “Software Defined Networking 2014” conference in London.  It’s a relatively small conference I would say however given the growing interest in SDN and rapid progress of the technology it’s always good to hear alternative viewpoints and exper…

It’s an exciting year for Scotland, with several very high profile events happening. On our doorstep in July is the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games – what we call “Glasgow 2014” – which, after the Olympics and World (soccer) Cup, is the third largest multi-nation sports…

Working in the Data Center and Cloud Professional Services team in Cisco on cloud and software defined networking, I am sometimes asked “What do you guys in Cisco Services really do?”  [especially by people in my office :-)]  I’ll use Cbeyond, one of our customers who offer differe…

One of the great challenges of SDN – that many in my view underplay – is the change in paradigm from having a vendor deliver your network (hardware + software), to having (potentially) an ecosystem deliver your network – and this ecosystem may require you to develop software to perform network tasks…

  As I was thinking about how best to advise you on how to “experiment” with SDN technologies, and more specifically why you should run a formal pilot to evaluate SDN technology options (a topic I covered in my previous blog), I was reminded of this “wipeout” picture I took last yea…

If you were to believe the industry press, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that many companies across the world were rolling software defined networking (SDN) technologies into their networks today.  I’m part of Cisco’s Services team and my colleagues across the world are the e…