Some public companies are starting the new year with hangovers. Cyan announced Monday afternoon that revenues for its fourth quarter, which ended in December, would trail expectations by about one-third after the company's largest customer trimmed spending. That customer is almost certainly Windstream, which represented 45 percent of Cyan's sales in 2012, according to Cyan's IPO prospectus earlier this year.

That prospectus did note that Windstream "publicly indicated its intention to reduce its overall capital expenditures in 2013," but the cutbacks were steeper than Cyan expected. Revenues from Windstream (which wasn't named in Cyan's press release) fell to $2 million in the fourth quarter from $19 million in the third quarter. Overall, Cyan's revenues will trail expectations by one-third ($20 million to $21 million, whereas Cyan had previously predicted $30 million to $32 million). Cyan's stock fell about 30 percent to $3.63 per share on Tuesday.

Procera announced its shortfall on Tuesday morning, citing weak ordering from U.S. cable customers. Its shares fell 20 percent to $11.94 that day.

VMware named Ben Fathi as CTO on Wednesday. His promotion (he'd been VMware's senior vice president of R&D) ends a year of CTO drought for VMware. Steve Herrod left the post in January 2013 to become a venture capitalist with General Catalyst Partners.

CloudNFV, the open-source project working on NFV proofs-of-concept, added Shenick Network Systems as its first test and measurement partner. Shenick's TeraVM platform could eventually be the basis for a "test data as-a-service" (TDaaS) offering, something CloudNFV Chief Architect Tom Nolle expounded upon in his blog.

... A Microsoft patent application suggests the company might join the blade server market, as the Blades Made Simple blog reports.

... Light Reading has named its Top 5 NFV Movers and Shakers, with only one vendor representative among them. Carol Wilson also comments on the very public nature of the work behind NFV, which made the list easier to compile.