ESG Blogs

Organizations today are digitally transforming their IT environments to become more agile and responsive to market and customer demands. While this typically includes people, process, and technology, the technology piece underpins many of the new processes and ensures your employees can collaborate and be productive.

Wi-Fi 6E

Wi-Fi 6E is the latest advancement in Wi-Fi technology, and last year the FCC opened up the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use in the US. What makes this so significant is that the amount of usable Wi-Fi will more than double (due to the amount of RF spectrum available for Wi-Fi).

With Wi-Fi 6E, we should expect to experience less network congestion due to wider channels and faster data rates that can support high-bandwidth applications and use cases—providing a realistic means to help speed innovation.

Last week, Extreme Networks held its annual customer event, Connect, virtually from Boston’s historic Fenway Park. The highlights from the event include new product introductions, a collection of customer and partner relationships, a celebration of 25 years in business, and insights into Extreme Networks' vision moving forward.

ESG recently completed its annual technology spending intentions survey of 664 senior IT decision makers at midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations across North America and Western Europe. As part of that research, respondents with purchasing influence or authority for networking products and services were asked about their organization’s networking spending plans over the next 12 months, and the results were published in the ESG brief, Network Spending Trends for 2021 (only available to ESG clients).

This week Cisco held its annual customer event, Cisco Live, for its global audience. With over 100,000 attendees from over 200 countries, this may be one of the best attended Cisco Live events. Despite most organizations having to work from home over the past year, it certainly hasn’t slowed down the innovation and productivity from the Cisco engineers. The theme of this year’s event was Turn IT Up, something that organizations across the globe have been doing since the pandemic hit and Cisco was quick to call out the IT heroes that worked tirelessly to transition to work-from-home environments and enable businesses to continue operations.

Secure access service edge (SASE) has continued to garner significant interest in the market due to the need to ensure that security and networking strategies and technologies are aligned to better address the increasingly distributed nature of the modern enterprise. In this video, Bob Laliberte and I discuss some of the different vendor approaches to SASE, the balance between platforms and best-of-breed approaches, and the organizational issues users must consider with regards to SASE.

It bears repeating that events like Dell Technologies World cover way too much ground to ever cover everything in a brief post. So we won't try! Instead, my ESG colleagues and myself are talking the "bite-sized-chunks" approach, dipping into various topics in reports, blogs, and videos as appropriate. One of the biggest announcements at this year's digital event ("big" as in likely impact rather than elapsed time on the virtual "stage") was Apex - Dell's as-a-service umbrella commitment - and we've already chatted about that in another single-topic video. 

Like so many industry and vendor events so far in 2020 (and no doubt like many more for a good while yet), VMworld was presented digitally this year. That significant change did not however affect its scale, whether measured by ambition, breadth of coverage or likely impact.

Extreme Networks recently held its 2020 User Conference, Extreme Connect, the first with Wes Durow, CMO. Keeping in line with the new reality we are all facing, it was a virtual event. However, Extreme took great efforts to give the thousands watching from home the feel of a main stage production and infuse two days' keynotes, breakout sessions, and executive chats with opportunities to have some fun and be entertained.

It’s not surprising that IT is getting more complicated. Digital transformation initiatives are proliferating across industries, and building out hybrid and multi-cloud environments is gaining traction. The need for speed is essential—especially when it comes to networking.

With this in mind, Cisco and Google recently announced their joint turnkey networking solution—Cisco SD-WAN Hub with Google Cloud. Google Cloud is providing hybrid and multi-cloud services, connectivity and security solutions, and Cisco SD-WAN solutions are offering single pane-of-glass SD-WAN management and secure connectivity to the cloud, streamlining operations by automating routine tasks.