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Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its full 4th quarter 2013 (4Q13) and year end Data Center Network Equipment and SAN and Converged Data Center Network Equipment reports, which now include forecasts for bundled solutions and ports-in-use for storage.

DATA CENTER NETWORK EQUIPMENT MARKET HIGHLIGHTS
.    Data center Ethernet switch ports sold as part of a bundled solution made up 27% of all data center ports shipped in 2013, growing to 45% in 2018
.    The bare metal switch market has the potential to transform a significant portion of the Ethernet switching market into a disaggregated model, similar to the server market

SAN AND CONVERGED DATA CENTER NETWORK MARKET HIGHLIGHTS
.    Nearly half of all converged data center network ports shipped in 4Q13 will carry
storage traffic
.    Infonetics forecasts Ethernet switch ports-in-use for storage to reach 55% of all data center purpose-built switch ports shipped in 2018
.    Switch ports-in-use for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are expected to account for 22% of all data center purpose-built ports shipped in 2018

ANALYST NOTE
“There’s still room for best-of-breed in the Ethernet switch market, but as the industry moves beyond early adopters and the early market for data center fabrics, the next wave of adoption has to be made simpler for the ‘main street’ buyer,” notes Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “This will keep the market for best-of-breed solutions healthy even as a portion of the data center Ethernet switch market turns to bundled solutions.”

Grossner adds: “The shift to cloud-architected data centers with automated deployment of virtual workloads will require storage networking to be more agile, driving the need for a converged network with storage and application traffic on Ethernet.”

REPORT SYNOPSES
Infonetics’ quarterly data center network equipment report tracks data center Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), WAN optimization appliances, and Ethernet switches sold in bundles (companies tracked: A10, Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Array Networks, Barracuda, Blue Coat, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, F5, HP, Huawei, IBM (BNT), Juniper, Kemp, Radware, Riverbed, others). Infonetics’ quarterly SAN and converged data center network equipment report tracks chassis and fixed Fibre Channel switches; Fibre Channel HBAs; converged data center switch ports-in-use for storage (iSCSI, FCoE, FC-to-FCoE); and converged data center network adapters (iSCSI, CNAs, universal) (companies tracked: Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, ATTO, Brocade, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM (BNT), Intel, Juniper, QLogic, others).

To buy the reports, contact Infonetics: http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp

IDC Data Network Prioritites Survey Results:

Reference:

A New Open Data Center Network: Disaggregating the Network Operating System from Switch/Router Gear

http://viodi.com/2013/06/25/a-new-open-data-center-network-disaggregatin…

FREE SDN REPORT AND WEBINAR:
Everyone who registers for analyst Cliff Grossner’s Virtualizing Networks with SDN NVOs and Bare Metal Switches webinar will receive a special Infonetics report, 2014: The Year SDN NVOs and Bare Metal Networking Get Serious. Join the live event March 25 at noon EDT or watch the replay. The webinar explores how network virtualization overlays (NVOs) and bare metal networking make data center network virtualization faster, easier, and more affordable:
http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=746584&s=1&k=F8942DEE951A3E32B8495DE59289A1E3

Introduction:

For the last three years, the IDC Directions annual conference has emphasized the 3rd Platform for IT, which consists of some combination of big data/ analytics, social collaboration for business, mobile and cloud computing/storage.  But this year, the market research firm produced numbers that imply the 3rd Platform is really taking hold.  It is disrupting entire industries, which in turn puts more pressure on IT professionals to adapt or die.  Surprisingly, much of that adaptation is being done at the departmental level, rather than the organization’s centralized IT department.

Frank Gens, IDC senior vice president and chief analyst, opening keynote set the stage for the presentations to follow. According to IDC, 25% of all IT spending in 2013 went toward the third platform, a percentage that will only grow in coming years. “Virtually 100% of all the marginal spending growth in IT is now coming from 3rd platform,” Gens said. “Now that every vendor in the industry has their full attention on that marketplace, this year is going to be all about pitched battles in every single corner of the third platform to establish new leadership in this market.”  Gens added that the 3rd platform is reinventing many industries, with six of the top 20 IT market leaders being disrupted by competitors. 

Probably the main driver of the 3rd platform has been the (core IT infrastructure) shift from premises data centers and networking to cloud computing and storage with almost everything now being offered “as a service.” Cloud’s adoption has been driven by three major factors: scale, complexity and speed, The cloud offers scale that regular businesses do not have, which allows them to deliver more complex services faster.

Focusing on the changing demands of the 3rd platform, Gens outlined the five key battlegrounds that will determine the winners and losers in 2014’s business IT transformation.

1. Core Infrastructure (Data Centers)

IDC predicts that the number of global cloud delivery centers will double in the next two years, with more vendors moving cloud capacity to developing marketplaces. This will lead to industry consolidation within the next four years, with the dozens of cloud infrastructure providers that are active today shrinking to between six and eight large companies.   Who they might be was not named (our guess is that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, IBM, and others will succeed in either private or public cloud, but not both).

2.  Internet of Things (IoT)

Gens talked about  Internet-connected things (IoT) — beyond smartphones and tablets — as the next battleground and indeed this was a major theme of 2014 IDC Directions with many talks on that topic. Manufacturers are introducing connectivity in some surprising products: jewelry, sports equipment, dog tags and even toothbrushes, Gens said. The growth in connective devices ties directly into the IoT, which IDC predicts will also see a boom in coming years.  Here’s the press release for their IoT market forecast: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24671614

The coming IoT revolution is hyper-extending (using IDC’s words) the edge of the network and will fuel a major explosion in killer apps impacting every industry worldwide. 

3. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Developers of cloud applications will rely on PaaS to deploy and support their software, which is quite a significant development as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) were the previous big cloud platforms offered.

IDC market research forecasts that 80% of new cloud applications in development will be hosted on the top six PaaS providers. Developers will only want to create apps for the most popular platforms. “It’s like musical chairs,” Gens said. “When the music stops, there are only so many seats left.”

Industry-specific cloud platforms are becoming more popular, especially since previous cloud platforms were industry neutral. IDC predicts that by 2016, more than 100 platforms targeting individual industries will be on the market.. Most significantly, big players in those industries — GE, Disney and John Deere, etc — are leading the way forward and are often welcoming competitors in as collaborators.

4.  Cloud Applications

With the mass migration from premises data centers to cloud computing, IDC predicts a tenfold growth in SaaS/AaaS over the next four years, worth about $20B by 2017. About two-thirds of them will be process or role-based business solutions and 75-80% of new cloud apps will be big data intensive.  These apps are being created by close to 18 million professional and hobbyist developers.  They should not be underestimated, Gens added.

5. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Over the next two years, IDC expects to see a large increase in the number of specialized infrastructure services. “The last five years, anyone who’s looked at the software industry have seen a huge flip,” Gens explained. The enterprise was once the traditional beginning point for new software, but that has now moved to the cloud. Gens commented: “Software developers have said, ‘If I have a new product, I can get it to market and scale is much more quickly if I introduce it first through a cloud service.'”

Other Data Points from IDC Direcitons 2014:

• Cloud computing was an estimated $47.4 billion industry in 2013 and is expected to more than double to $107 billion by 2017.
• Clloud computing’s 23.5% compound annual growth rate is five times faster than that of the broader technology market.
  
• An IDC’s survey revealed that 41% of its 143 IT executive respondents said application modernization was important, followed by 38% who named big data/business analytics and 35% who noted security/risk management as the key areas their organizations will focus on this year.
• 80% of new cloud apps will be “big data intensive”
• Convenience will trump everything, including security and reliability!
• “For every mobile device that’s launched, there has to be a large data center behind it to enable it,” Rick Villars said. This led to a wave of “mega data centers” being built by the likes of Google, Verizon and others.
  
• As IoT gets built out along with wearable technologies, there will be a need to locate (satellite) cloud data centers closer to the premises, according to Villars.
• There are still no solid standards for IoT, especially provisioning, activation/de-activation, monitoring and management.  The data standards and protocols are likely to be industry specific, e.g. health care, retail stores, finance, etc.

Closing Comment:

This year’s IDC Directions has no sessions on Software Defined Networking (SDN) or Network Virtualization.  That was in sharp contrast to last year’s conference program.  Perhaps, the conference organizers have recognized that the SDN/NFV industry is spinning (or drowning in hype)

In response to an audience question after his closing keynote, UT Professor of Innovation Bob Metcalfe, PhD, said that “software defined networking hasn’t really found it’s niche yet.  Perhaps, it will be in managing the Internet of Things.”  We couldn’t agree with him more.

Addendum:  Internet of Things (IoT)

McKinsey Global Institute’s Disruptive Technologies report calls out the Internet of Things (IoT) as a top disruptive technology trend that will have an impact of as much as $6 Trillion on the world economy by 2025 with 50 billion connected devices. The Internet of Things is the next huge wave of growth of the Internet.  Big growth numbers and expectations are dramatically expanding for the Internet of Things in Silicon Valley and globally. Valuations for IoT startups have also increased dramatically and caught Wall Street and the venture capital community by storm, including Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion dollars and Jawbone’s pre-IPO valuation at $1.5 billion.

 The author is available (under contract) to do a thorough report of IDC’s IoT presentations as well as IoT findings from TiECon 2014 on May 16. 

http://tiecon.org/internet-of-things

John Donovan wants to revamp AT&T’s network using SDN, but also its internal policies, methods and procedures. AT&T’s senior executive vice president of technology and network operations was strong on conviction, but short on details during his March 4th keynote speech at the Open Network Summit (ONS) in Santa Clara, CA.  

You can watch that keynote, along with opening remarks from ONS Chairman Guru Parulkar, PhD at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLshR-BkIas

AT&T is committed to shifting to a more agile networking strategy, which it’s calling User-Defined Network Cloud or Domain 2.0.  According to Donovan, there are four key principles that will guide AT&T’s network transformation: 

1. Open- APIs are the perfect tool

2. Simple- a more common network infrastructure

3. Scale-  evolve network to support high traffic growth

4. Secure- protect the Control Plane

“We intend to provide elastic network services, just like cloud provides elastic computing and storage services today,” Donovan said. “Customers will be able to self-provision networking services on the fly, as needed, just as they now do with compute services and storage from cloud service providers,” he added.  

Donovan shook up the audience (especially this author) when he said:

“We’re changing everything at AT&T:

• How the network is built (presumably with much more software control)
• The actual equipment and the software – leveraging open source principles and software
• How AT&T will be partnering and purchasing from both startups and larger companies
• AT&T’s operations and culture – changing their OSS model while pursuing network agility”

To that latter point, Donovan said that AT&T plans to retire more than 1,000 of its current OSS applications. In their place, the carrier hopes to handle operations such as billing and provisioning through parallel processes “as opposed to the inhibiting process that defines everything that we do,” Donovan said.  It was quite refreshing to hear an AT&T executive admit that the company is plagued by “inhibiting processes,” which often is the cause for botched service orders and delayed service deployments.

Orchestration of many distributed controllers will be one of the most difficult steps in the SDN migration.  During the Q & A session, Donovan was asked whether any vendors have orchestration offerings that  AT&T’s goals and objectives. “We’ve had a lot of very interesting dialogue, but we have nothing ready to deploy,” he said.  “That is a massive software project. It will be a highly complex, multi-participant approach. We’re going to have to even write some of it ourselves,” he added.

“Our backbone today, we manage over 4 million routes, and that’s larger than you can get from any control plane, so we wrote our own. So, we’re not brand new to this game.”

“Our strategy is more than just a network design change,” Donovan added. “It’s a change in how we do business with suppliers and with how we manage platforms, systems and software. It changes our people. We have to take advantage of cultural change at our company.”  Wow, that was quite an impressive statement from an AT&T executive!

In answer to a question from a skeptical Light Reading analyst, Donovan replied that AT&T is making real progress in its evolution to SDN. He said that the company has succeeded in abstracting the control plane from the backbone network – one of the first steps to realize the separation of the control plane from data plane. “What I’m talking about is radically reshaping the WAN,” Donavan noted.

And what about this year’s roadmap for SDN?  “What we’re looking for in 2014 are beachhead projects that can move us from an old Domain 1 architecture to a Domain 2 architecture. We’re calling it D1.5,” Donovan said. The idea is to fit controllers onto AT&T’s current platforms, extending the lives of those platforms.

The beachhead projects are meant to happen quickly. AT&T has already identified “a half dozen” of them, Donovan said. Moving into 2015, AT&T hopes to start introducing applications that were born in the cloud, a buildup that should lead to a “crescendo effect,” Donovan said.

Comment & Analysis:

We wonder what version of SDN AT&T will implement?  No details on the specific network infrastructure were announced at ONS 2014, nor in any AT&T press releases.  Donovan did not mention OpenFlow in his speech and the carrier is NOT a member of the Open Network Foundation (ONF) that is standardizing that southbound API/protocol between the Control and Data planes.

At previous year ONS events, Chair Guru Parulkar, PhD, emphatically stated there was only one version of SDN, which clearly separated Control and Data planes via OpenFlow southbound API.  Anything else was “SDN washing,” he said.  That statement was not repeated at ONS 2014.  In fact most speakers said that OpenFlow was one of many protocols that would be used for SDN. Some clearly stated that they would not use OpenFlow at all, as it didn’t solve the open networking problems adequately.

In a March 14 conversation with Soren Telfer of AT&T’s Palo Alto Foundry, we learned that OpenFlow is under investigation along with many other protocols that might be used in “distributed systems.”  More about that phone interview in a forthcoming article.

In conclusion, we think AT&T has a very long way to go to transition its network to SDN and NFV.  One of the key issues will certainly be vendor interoperability when there are no universally accepted open interfaces/protocols that have been standardized.  Ericcson- one of AT&T’s Domain 2.0 vendors and host for their Palo Alto Foundry, said (at both at ONS 2014 and 2013) that they are not using OpenFlow in their SDN implementations,  So the SDN eco-system really can’t count on OpenFlow as a core standard and there are many more needed. Ultimately, the actual standards will have to be published by ITU-T as “carrier grade” SDN and NFV recommendations.

Meanwhile, we call your attention to NTT Communications, who has deployed SDN/OpenFlow for almost two years now and is planning to launch NFV this summer.  

NTT Com Leads all Network Providers in Deployment of SDN/OpenFlow; NFV Coming Soon

http://viodi.com/2014/03/15/ntt-com-leads-all-network-providers-in-deplo…

Infonetics Research launched a new research service this year – Broadband Subscriber Database by Provider, led by analyst Jeff Heynen. The latest report, released this week, contains demographic and subscriber data of more than 130 global wireline broadband providers.

SELECT BROADBAND SUBSCRIBER DATABASE HIGHLIGHTS:
.    The top 6 wireline broadband providers by subscriber are, in rank order, China Telecom, China Unicom, Comcast, NTT Group, Deutsche Telekom, and AT&T
.    Fixed broadband subscribers in China totaled 183 million in the third quarter of 2013, up 37% in two years
.    In the Middle East, wireline broadband subscribers grew more than threefold in the same period
.    China Telecom, NTT Group, and Verizon are the leading providers of FTTH services
.    Comcast and Time Warner Cable are the 2 largest cable broadband operators by subscribers in the world, and the merged companies will tout over 31 million subscribers

FTTH subscribers are growing rapidly in Europe, while Asia Pacific region is growing faster.

ANALYST NOTE:

“We’re seeing phenomenal growth in fixed broadband subscribers in Asia Pacific, particularly China, where China Telecom and China Unicom continue to add both DSL and FTTH subscribers at a phenomenal pace. Meanwhile, Latin America continues to see moderate growth in both cable and DSL subscribers,” reports Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.

Heynen continues: “FTTH subscribers in Europe are now showing signs of solid growth, with Swisscom, Free, and Telefonica among a handful of operators moving forward with FTTH.”

ABOUT THE SUBSCRIBER DATABASE:
Infonetics’ quarterly broadband subscriber database tracks fixed broadband subscribers (DSL, cable broadband, FTTB and LAN, FTTH) in North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia Pacific, and CALA (Caribbean and Latin America). The database, which includes searchable and sortable pivot tables, data, and charts, provides subscriber data by region, technology, individual service provider, and service provider type (cable operator, competitive, incumbent, independent wireless, satellite). It also includes service provider demographics and a Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) Tracker that lists manufacturer, model, and type of CPE by service provider.

To buy the database, contact Infonetics: http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp

In a related report on Set Top Boxes, Heynen wrote:  “The overall set-top box (STB) market declined in 2013, but cable and satellite video gateways had a very strong year, with shipments growing 333% and 98%, respectively,” says Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.

“Video gateways collapse the STB and broadband CPE into a single device, and it’s for this reason we expect to see a long-term shift to these devices, at least in North America, to reduce capex in multiple TV set homes,”  he added.   Infonetics expects global IP video gateway revenue to grow at a 79% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 to 2018.

Evidently Heynen is on a roll.  In yet another Infonetics report issued last week titled: Tier 3 Broadband Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Service Provider Survey, he wrote:

“Tier 3 operators in the U.S. are already heavily invested in FTTH networks and will continue to expand their fiber availability until they reach their entire subscriber base.  But like other operators around the world outside of China,” Heynen continues, “The long-term transition to fiber will happen incrementally, with fiber-to-the-node and fiber-to-the-curb deployments using VDSL2 as a critical, strategic tool in the effort to keep up with subscriber and network bandwidth demands.”

TIER 3 BROADBAND SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS:
.    Only 5% of operators participating in Infonetics’ survey are providing average downstream speeds of 100+ Mbps today, increasing to 45% by 2016
.    Survey respondents expect capital expenditures earmarked for fixed broadband networks to remain flat
.    After 2014, 55%-75% of respondents plan to upgrade and expand their networks with 2.5G GPON and Ethernet FTTH
.    Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents upgrading their networks with system-level vectored VDSL2 goes from 0 in 2013 to 30% in 2014
.    A majority of those surveyed named Calix, Adtran, and Alcatel-Lucent as the top 3 fixed broadband access equipment suppliers

TO BUY INFONETICS REPORTS, CONTACT:
N. America (West), Asia Pacific: Larry Howard, [email protected], +1 408-583-3335
N. America (East, Midwest), L. America: Scott Coyne, [email protected], +1 408-583-3395
EMEA, India, Singapore: George Stojsavljevic, [email protected], +44 755-488-1623
Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan: http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp

In a just released report, Infonetics Research summarizes the 2013 optical network hardware (OTN and SONET/SDH) and Packet Optical Transport System (P-OTS) markets, provides their 2014 outlook, as well as which vendors are benefiting the most.

OTN AND P-OTS MARKET HIGHLIGHTS:
.    Worldwide overall OTN revenue totaled $8 billion in 2013, or 66% of all optical network hardware spending
.    The OTN switching segment of the market grew 37% in 2013
.    The market for P-OTS equipment came to $1.7 billion in 2013, split fairly evenly between metro edge and metro regional P-OTS gear
.    P-OTS revenue grew 32% between the second half of 2012 and the second half of 2013
.    Infonetics projects the OTN switching segment to grow at about a 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 to 2018

Infonetics previously reported that service providers are choosing OTN switching as the technology best suited to filling 100G pipes, because it enables efficient aggregation of diverse services and protocols over a single link. 

ANALYST NOTE:

 “OTN switching had a major year of growth in 2013 as service providers prioritized installation of integrated WDM+OTN switching and 100G coherent technology in the core. Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, and Infinera are the key beneficiaries here,” notes Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research. “Meanwhile, Chinese carriers continue to expand large deployments of OTN switching, with Huawei as the sole beneficiary.”

Schmitt adds: “Over in the P-OTS space, incumbent vendors Cisco, Fujitsu, Tellabs, Ciena, and Alcatel-Lucent are the market leaders, but new players BTI, Cyan, Transmode, and Ericsson are challenging with pure-play P-OTS platforms.”

On Feb 18, 2013, Schmitt wrote: “Optical spending flattened in the fourth quarter of 2013, though it wasn’t distributed evenly around the world or by vendor. Weakness was concentrated in North America, but a year-end capex surge in EMEA evened things up.  All indications are that an all-clear from Verizon and AT&T is forthcoming and the Q4 drop was a pause rather than a reversal — and this is in line with our forecasts.” 

REPORT SYNOPSIS:

 Infonetics’ biannual OTN and packet optical report provides worldwide and regional market size, vendor market share, forecasts through 2018, analysis, and trends for OTN transport and switching hardware, including metro edge and metro regional port revenue forecasts by type and speed. Companies tracked: Adtran, Adva, Alcatel Lucent, BTI, Ciena, Cisco, Cyan, ECI, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Infinera, NEC, NSN, Tellabs, Transmode, ZTE, and others.

To buy the report, contact Infonetics:

http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp

In related optical transport news, Windstream today announced it’s deploying the Infinera DTN-X platform, featuring 500 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) super-channels across Windstream’s long-haul express network. The Infinera Intelligent Transport Network enables Windstream to differentiate their services, protect their investment and lower operational expense as they scale their network. 
Windstream operates a nationwide fiber and IP network, covering 118,000 miles of fiber and 27 data center locations across the nation. As a cloud solutions provider, Windstream serves businesses with a wide range of cloud communication needs, in addition to offering an advanced data, voice and video network that provides customers low latency and reliable 100 Gigabit Ethernet services.  

“By deploying the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network, Windstream will significantly increase the capacity of our network infrastructure to meet the needs of our customers,” said Randy Nicklas, executive vice president of engineering and chief technology officer for Windstream. “The DTN-X platform enables us to offer services that result in lower latency for mission critical applications while providing a network that is even more reliable and enables rapid provisioning of services.”

Read more at:

http://www.infinera.com/pdfs/news/2014/pr20140310-Windstream_Deploys_Inf…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is about embedding communications technology in all objects that can benefit from it, from cars to buildings, everyday objects and even materials.  It’s an ongoing revolution that has much potential and promise to revolutionize the electronics industry.  Advances in making smaller microelectronics devices, sensors and low-power radio communications, are making the IoT a commercial reality.  Google’s $3.2B acquisition of smart thermostat makerNest is a great example of that dynamic as per this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2014/01/13/google-acquires-nest-for-3-2-billion/

On February 20th, Zach Shelby -Director of IoT technology at ARM Ltd, presented an interesting talk on the IoT at a Santa Clara University (SCU) EE Dept Colloquium. Zach was co-founder and head of research at Sensinode in Finland before that company was acquired last fall by ARM Ltd.  As a result of that acquisition, Zach now works at ARM’s San Jose, CA office as an IoT evangelist and technology director.   Here are the highlights of his SCU talk:

• IoT combines embedded electronic devices with the Internet mostly using low power wireless interfaces.
• Machine to Machine (M2M) applications when combined with the Internet (either directly or indirectly connected devices) comprise the IoTs.
• M2M apps include:  asset management, facility management, security monitoring, energy management, weather stations, etc
• IoT produces Little Data (in contrast to Big Data/analytics) via small streams of data.
• IoT breaks down silos or walled gardens of closed systems
• Gartner Group predicts that by 2018, 50% of IoT solutions will be from start-ups <3 years old.  
• IoT is a disruptive technology as it changes the way “things” (devices) are made.
• Some key markets for IoT include-Smart Home, Smart Cities, Fitness/exercise equipment, and Asset Management
• ARM Ltd is working on a lot of software to make the IoT a commercial reality. For example, a Development Platform for Devices is available at:https://mbed.org/
• ARM has developed wireless communications I/O drivers for LTE and WiFi endpoints that are not VLSI component specific.The company supports Java ME as well as JAVA script on its software development platformLocal Processing, Security, communications, discovery and end to end device management are included in ARM’s IoT architecture.

Reference:
http://www.ee.scu.edu/classes/2014winter/elen200/shelby.pdf

Samsung creates medical test bed to prove Internet of Things is worth the effort

The partnership between Samsung and the University of California, San Francisco sets out with a single goal: to develop a test bed for medical sensors in efforts to validate the worth of emerging Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technologies, otherwise known as the Internet of Things. 

The South Korean giant’s joint project with medical professionals will work to develop network-connected sensors for gadgets, signalling a divergence in the company’s strategy by focusing on health and the wider medical world.

http://www.zdnet.com/samsung-creates-medical-test-bed-to-prove-internet-…

Cisco CEO: 2014 will be a big year for the Internet of Things -will be worth $19Trillion over next 10 years!

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says the Internet of Things could represent $19 trillion of economic value over the next 10 years, and will affect society more than the Internet itself. Chambers says this year could be a turning point as more devices become connected, and that he expects there to be 50 billion Internet-connected devices by 2020.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress trade show, Chambers said that the Internet of things will potentially have five to ten times the impact on society over the Internet itself.

As an illustration of the growth of connected devices, Chambers noted that there were only 1,000 devices connected to the Internet when Cisco was created in 1984. There were more than 10 billion connected devices in 2010, and they outnumber the actual number of people now. By 2020, Chambers said he expects to see 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57619548-94/how-much-is-the-internet-of-everything-worth-cisco-says-$19-trillion/

Infonetics Research released vendor market share and preliminary analysis from its 4th quarter 2013 (4Q13) and year end Optical Network Hardware report. (Full report to be published by February 24.)

OPTICAL MARKET HIGHLIGHTS:
.    Worldwide optical network hardware revenue, including WDM and SONET/SDH, was essentially flat in 4Q13, totaling $3.1 billion
.    For the full year 2013, the overall optical network hardware market is down 3%
.    On a positive note, the WDM segment posted a 6th consecutive quarter of growth in 4Q13 and ended the full year 2013 up 11% as 100G deployments hit the ground
.    Though the traditional 4Q capex flush was in full effect in EMEA, the region recorded a 5th straight year of spending declines; Infonetics expects EMEA to revert back to being a third of global spending within 1-2 years
.    The Chinese optical market closed 2013 up only 6%, but performance is anticipated to improve in 2014 as 100G rollouts pick up steam
.    EMEA optical heavyweights Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Coriant, and Huawei all had a big 4Q13

ANALYST NOTE
“Optical spending flattened in the fourth quarter of 2013, though it wasn’t distributed evenly around the world or by vendor. Weakness was concentrated in North America, but a year-end capex surge in EMEA evened things up,” notes Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research.

Schmitt adds: “All indications are that an all-clear from Verizon and AT&T is forthcoming and the Q4 drop was a pause rather than a reversal – and this is in line with our forecasts.” 

ABOUT THE OPTICAL REPORT:
Infonetics’ quarterly optical hardware report provides worldwide and regional market size, market share, forecasts through 2018, analysis, and trends for metro and long haul SONET/SDH and WDM equipment, Ethernet optical ports, SONET/SDH/POS ports, and WDM ports. Vendors tracked: Adva, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Cyan, ECI, Fujitsu, Huawei, Infinera, NEC, Coriant, Tellabs, Transmode, Tyco Telecom, ZTE, and others. To buy the report, contact Infonetics: http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp.

RELATED REPORT EXCERPTS:
.    Operators answer the big questions about metro 100G and ROADM deployments
.    Pricing pressures drive down ROADM component market in first half of 2013
.    Carriers dialing back spending on optical equipment; WDM segment outpaces the market

Note the steep decline in N America & Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) Optical Network Equipment Spending in the chart below:

RECENT AND UPCOMING OPTICAL RESEARCH:
Download Infonetics’ 2014 market research brochure, publication calendar, events brochure, report highlights, tables of contents, and more at http://www.infonetics.com/login

References:

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2013/12/20/fbrs-scott-thompson-ex…

http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/02/cir-400g-report.html

http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2014/02/400g-optical-transport-m…

http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/network-infrastructure-2014-market-ou…

http://www.sdncentral.com/news/ericsson-drops-optical-partners-ciena/201…

100G WEBINAR:

Join analyst Andrew Schmitt and JDSU, MRV, and Transmode on Wednesday, February 19, for 100G in the Metro: When and Where It Will Be Economical, a live event covering new approaches and technologies for cost-effectively deploying 100G in the metro. Register today: 

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=737721&s=1&k=4C4FEAE8EA6BE2BE5618AD600E607F5D

Addendum:

Frontier offers wavelength service in 25 states:
Frontier Communications’ Frontier Optical Transport Service, a 10-gigabit wavelength service, was rolled out Monday in 25 states. The company will install optical fiber to buildings of customers that order the service. “If we don’t lay the fiber, someone else will,” Frontier’s Lisa Partridge said. “We believe it’s necessary because of how quickly bandwidth is doubling and tripling.” Telecompetitor.com 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has put out requests for vendor qualifications as Chicago prepares to bring gigabit-class Internet service to certain neighborhoods. Chicago has designated seven “Innovation Zones” for the faster service which will not based on Google Fiber. 

The biggest and busiest city in the Midwest, Chicago is home to almost 3 million people. Comcast provides high-speed cable Internet access, while AT&T is the major DSL provider.

Before powering up the seven ultra high speed Internet zones, the city says it must take several months reviewing qualifications
 and proposals from potential vendors.  The goal, Yager says, is to promote businesses and universities across Chicago.
“This is really a huge economic development initiative,” she said. She believes providing access to gigabit-speed Internet — which is 100 times faster than basic broadband — will encourage business creation, growth, expansion and relocation.

http://bluesky.chicagotribune.com/originals/chi-rahm-emanuel-gigabit-speed-internet-bsi-20140207,0,0.story

In a report today on Level 3 Communications (LVLT), FBR analyst David Dixon makes the case that enterprise customers of private line, VPN, voice trunking and other transport services are moving to the cloud for those and more.  Dixon wrote:

“We see (service provider) companies offering bundled cloud, transport, and access services (where access services are heavily discounted to secure higher-value cloud services) and believe the company cost structure may shift more than expected due to the change in the nature of content relationships over time, perhaps driving a review of peering interconnections with end-user networks and potential migration of customers to single integrated wireline/wireless providers.”

Continuing, “Level 3’s  guidance depends on a number of “X factors” over the near future, including sustaining positive enterprise growth and more aggressive dark fiber sales. We are seeing more appetite from wireless network providers for dark fiber (to locations already served with leased lit fiber) as their architecture shifts get underway. The risk is that these companies may confine LVLT to providing lower-margin transport services. In the CDN (Content Delivery Network) segment, we like the current momentum but see this business pressured over time by the irreversible mix shift of Internet traffic toward “two-way” content increasingly distributed on cloud-based architectures that provide compute AND storage.”

In his analysis of Akamai’s earnings report, Dixon wrote: “Fundamentally, we are concerned about the increased pressure on Akamai’s CDN-based business model over time” for exactly the same reason- customer migration to cloud compute and storage services.  Akamai is the company behind FaceBook, Apple, and other massive global web properties. The company claims to deliver 30% of all Web traffic. Akamai is rated as a top notch CDN, with 96 out of the 100 top online retailers in the U.S. relying on Akamai’s CDN.  http://www.akamai.com/

Earlier this week, the WSJ reported: Apple Quietly Builds New Networks

Apple was said to be “stitching together a network of Internet infrastructure capable of delivering large amounts of content to customers, giving the company more control over the distribution of its online offerings while laying the groundwork for more traffic if it decides to move deeper into television.”

That might adversely effect Akamai’s future revenues. “DeepField says Apple distributes most of its Internet content through Akamai’s network of servers. Akamai executives recently said they are renegotiating a multiyear contract with their top customer, a process that typically results in lower fees for the company.”

Akamai’s CEO Tom Leighton hinted at the news that Apple may be thinking of going it alone for a CDN with this comment to industry analysts: “Any very large media customer at one time or another is looking at a do-it-yourself solution. It’s a lot harder than people think, though. What may have seemed like a good idea at the time, over a period of years, often doesn’t.”

Article written by Scott Thompson of FBR Capital Markets.

References provided by Alan J Weissberger of IEEE ComSoc

OCS Report:

On January 28 and 29, the Open Compute Summit held its annual gathering where hyperscale and large enterprises show cased the creative and cutting-edge work they have pioneered over the past year in a quest to drive costs and complications from the IT landscape. We attended the conference and present some of the more important points below.

    * One of the messages with the most impact at Open Compute this year was delivered by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He suggested that one of the top strategic priorities at Facebook is to find a way to deliver Internet service to a larger portion of the world’s population.  Mr. Zuckerberg stressed that emerging markets (two-thirds of the planet’s population) often do not have the same access to the Internet as does the developed world. Facebook believes that finding a way to provide affordable access to the Internet for those markets represents one of Facebook’s largest growth opportunities. He added that the costs Facebook presently incurs to deploy networks that run its services would need to decline to one-tenth of current rates to make this goal financially achievable. He also added that Facebook has a plan to deliver those types of network efficiencies over the next five years and that the Open Compute Project is an essential cornerstone of that effort.

    * We found a chorus of network pioneers at the event that agreed with Mr. Zuckerberg’s assessment. The networking and compute process, when combined in ways that webscale operations have been perfecting for several years, is likely to deliver significant savings, compared to traditional methods and architectures.

Intel is introducing reference designs for “rack-scale architecture” that, by 2015-2016, should dramatically change the way the world processes data and manages compute resources and networks both together.

During a panel hosted by Facebook’s Director of Infrastructure Najam Ahmad, a large number of panelists appeared to confirm that there is a clear and new reference design for how the IT community is beginning to measure efficient datacenter infrastructure.

Martin Casado, PhD & CTO of networking at VMWare, and J.R. Rivers of Cumulus Networks both seemed to agree that the new distributed datacenter model used by many hyperscale networks has achieved new levels of efficiency. Mr. Casado suggested these reference designs, across both enterprise and service verticals, are quickly becoming the de facto standard by which new and more efficient networking technologies can be deployed. He suggested that we may be nearly past the technical barriers required for achieving hypserscale efficiencies and that the primary constraint keeping enterprises and service providers from adopting similar technologies is now cultural. Casado believes that educating those who design and deploy IT systems is now the most effective way to bring about wholesale change across the networking landscape.

    * The Open Compute Project (OCP) appears focused on this challenge in 2014. While the pure pace of innovative technology on display at this year’s Open Compute Summit appeared to have slowed, relative to the last one, the mechanisms and framework needed to effect and propagate change appear to be improving dramatically.

The OCP appears to be rapidly gaining the support of the vendor community, bringing it closer to an ecosystem for the acquisition of bespoke networking and compute equipment. From a logical  perspective, we continue to have reservations that an “open community” will have the scale and purchasing power to effect change across vendors that might prefer other solutions, but we remain impressed by the scale, scope, and momentum that the OCP has created over the past few years. Whether it proves to be long term or not, Open Compute and its member organizations are changing the face of the IT landscape.

References:

1. SDN Central’s OCP Summit Report:

http://tinyurl.com/m9442bo

2. OCP-Network Group Charter & more

http://files.opencompute.org/oc/public.php?service=files&t=437680b2416f9…

3.  Broadcom’s Leaf & Spine Network Switch Spec

http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/Open-Compute-Project-BRCM-Open…

4.  Intel’s 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet Rack Mountable Switch Standard, by Michael Miller

Contact: [email protected]  for a soft copy (pdf)