Summer Slump Or End Of Recovery?

Back in the good ol' days of covering the networking industry, you could always count on a summer slowdown for most of July and August. As people went on vacations, the product introductions slowed to a crawl, allowing us time to work on big-picture stories or clean out e-mail folders before the wave of fall trade shows began.

During the Internet boom, the slowdown disappeared; then during the bust, it spread across several years. Now, as a sort-of recovery struggles to gain momentum, there are some warning signs that not everybody is following the time-to-spend-again thinking. The recent reports of missed targets in the enterprise software market should be a warning sign for networking concerns, since it's application use that drives the need for bandwidth, not the other way around.

On the other hand, there still seems to be a resurgence of infrastructure buildouts for service delivery, a sign that providers are still willing to bet that the imminent future holds greater demand from corporations and consumers.

So is it just a return of the cyclical summer slump, or a real end to the modest "recovery" that hasn't yet caught fire? The guess here is that it's still OK to take that summer trip, kick back a bit and relax. But keep one eye on the earnings reports, just in case.