SD-WAN

It’s hard to believe that 2 ½ years ago, in my role as Head of Network Services at Cigna, I was in NYC presenting a concept to an emerging community called the Open Network Users Group.  Prior to the event, I vividly recall Nick Lippis (ONUG chair) asking me if this was a concept that I would bet my…

Holidays seem to come earlier every year in the U.S. One could see Christmas decorations up inside major retailers even before Halloween. Very soon, a series of American and Ethnic holidays will be upon us, and Tis the Season of Giving. For this holidays season, as you search for a gift that will ke…

Have you ever imagined what your car, phone, laptop, or anything you own for that matter, would say if it could speak? I think my phone would tell me to stop dropping it.  My car would beg me to get it washed. What if the routers that have been powering your branch network all these years could talk…

If “talk nerdy to me” were to be elevated to an art form, then at Cisco, we’re Rembrandt! Following a recent article suggesting that our naming convention(s) for our line of Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) is confusing — I’d go so far as to say “drowning in six-letter acronyms and…

The Opportunity By year-end 2017, Gartner estimates at least five global carriers will have incorporated SD-WAN as a key component of their managed network service designs. At least two Tier 1 operators have already made announcements in line with this prediction. By year-end 2018, Gartner estimate…

It’s Spring and that means the IT events season is in full bloom.  The calendar at that time of the year is packed and we are looking forward to ONUG (Open Networking User Group) Spring 2016.  The event will be at held at Intuit’s headquarter in Mountain View, CA from May 9-11, 2016. It&…

Virtualizing your network functions and decoupling them from specific hardware can help you simplify operations, automate service delivery, and make money more quickly. Find out how to do it the right way in our latest Fundamentals installment. At one level, NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is…

What comes to mind when you hear the term Network Functions Virtualization(NFV)?  Until recently, at least in my mind, the answers were ‘Service Providers’, ‘vCPE’, ‘Cloud’. If you don’t know what NFV is, read this blog post first and come back. But why does NFV have to be exclusively for service pr…

Still too often, nowadays, I look at my phone and my stomach drops. I see: “3G”… Even worse, I see: “1x”… I think to myself: It’s the year 2015 and the world is becoming increasingly digitized. IDC’s Internet of Things Forecast states that there will be 4 billion people using 50 billion devices all…