I can’t tell you how many times one of my clients or contacts has complained about the difficulties associated with getting network-budget approval. If I’d never met a CFO in person, the description these people gave me would have led me to expect something like a troll or a zombie, bent on eating projects and maybe people, too. Do we wear garlic when we visit the CFO, or maybe do a chant before the meeting, or might there be a more practical approach?

CFOs aren’t just trying to mess up a good technology project (at least most of the time), they’re trying to validate two basic financial rules that govern technology procurements.  Rule One is that any project must advance a company’s financial position and not hurt it. That seems logical, but it’s often difficult to assess just what the return on investment (ROI) of any project is.  Rule Two is that you don’t want to buy equipment that you’ll have to replace before it’s been fully depreciated. The useful life of something should be at least as long as the financial life as set by tax laws.

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OK, help me understand this. Microsoft just spent almost $20 billion to buy Nuance, the company that supplies the popular Dragon speech-to-text tool. Microsoft already has speech-to-text available in Windows 10 and through Azure, and even a partnership with Nuance. Nuance’s single big jump in stock price in its history coincides with Covid and WFH, which is now (hopefully) passing. Nuance revenue boom? Apparently, ending. The Dragon product? Incremental to Microsoft’s current position. Health care vertical? Interesting, but not a cash cow.

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There’s open, then there’s open.  At least that seems to be the case with network technology. Maybe it’s the popularity and impact of open-source software, or maybe it’s just that the word “open” makes you think of being wild, happy, and free—whatever it is, the concept of openness in networking is catching on. Which means, of course, that the definition is getting fuzzier every day.

When I talk with enterprises, they seem to think that openness in networking is the opposite of proprietary, which they then define is a technology for which there is a single source. That suggests that open networking is based on technology for which multiple sources exist, but as logical as that sounds, it may not help much.

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We all know the old saw about pushing a strand of spaghetti uphill, and I’ve got to wonder whether that’s what we’re now doing with 5G. 

First, 5G is going to happen because of the orderly process of modernizing wireless networks.  It doesn’t need “justifying”. The problem is that vendors want 5G to be revolutionary and transformational, rather than orderly. Second, that need to seem revolutionary has pushed 5G stories to the boundaries of sensibility.

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If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own.  We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work.  We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right?  Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that?  Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.

We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware.  Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize.  That just doesn’t scale.  Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic is going.

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