Day: October 7, 2013

Late last week, Alcatel-Lucent formally announced its CloudBand Ecosystem Program.  This is not the vendor’s first foray into SDN/NFV or ecosystem building.  Still, it does mark the first time it has boiled them together in the same soup.  Ecosystem programs are super-common in the early days of a new market, so this probably won’t be the last.  One question, then, that we didn’t try to tackle in our analyses is a pretty simple one.  Is Alcatel-Lucent the right vendor to drive this sort of effort?

While my colleague, Peter, outlines the reasons why Alcatel-Lucent might not be the best suited to orchestrate this type of effort, I drew the long straw this time around and get to play the ‘good cop.’  In a nutshell, Alcatel-Lucent is a good candidate to help build an ecosystem around virtualization because of the many reasons that seem to have hamstrung the company over the past few years.

Wait, what? Continue reading “NFV Ecosystems: Is Alcatel-Lucent the Best Vendor to Drive Them? (Answer = Yes)” →

Late last week, Alcatel-Lucent formally announced their CloudBand Ecosystem Program.  I say, “formally” because the vendor had first referenced the program back in July in a blog post from CloudBand general manager Dor Skuler.  You know us, we had analyses on those developments.

• Network Functions Virtualization and Telco Cloud: What Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks Taught Us Last Month
• Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand Ecosystem Program: Driving Open NFV Development Efforts – Hopefully to Better Effect Than Open API Efforts

Ecosystem programs are super-common in the early days of a new market, so this probably won’t be the last.  One question, then, that we didn’t try to tackle in our analyses is a pretty simple one. Is Alcatel-Lucent  the right vendor to drive this sort of effort?

There’s no one answer – so we’ll give you two.  Continue reading “NFV Ecosystems: Is Alcatel-Lucent the Best Vendor to Drive Them? (Answer = No)” →