ESG Blogs

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.

For the last couple of years, SD-WAN technology has been on a roll. Businesses going through digital transformation initiatives are increasingly leveraging cloud platforms to host applications (both IaaS and SaaS) that are critical to the business. However, the legacy hub and spoke networks leveraging private telco links were not designed for direct connection to cloud-based apps from remote locations. Instead, all the traffic was funneled through the data center, creating a lot of round trips, latency, and poor user experiences.

Last week, I attended Cisco’s #InternetForTheFuture event in San Francisco. This was a major announcement for Cisco and marked their entry into selling merchant silicon and optics developed by Cisco. Specifically, it announced Silicon One, the 8000 series portfolio with IOS XR7 and a line of optics solutions

A couple of weeks ago, a company called Pensando came out of stealth mode in NYC. It was formed from what the chairman of the company, John Chambers, is coining “a different kind of 20 somethings.” Indeed this is not a typical Silicon Valley, hoodie and sneakers wearing 20 year olds' startup, but rather one that has founders with 20 something years of delivering innovative and disruptive technologies time and time again (think Andiamo, Insieme etc.). They are all ex-Cisco senior executives, Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, and Soni Jiandani, colloquially referred to as “MPLS.”

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time in the Verizon 5G lab in Waltham MA. Verizon was hosting an analyst day to demonstrate how Verizon is going to use 5G to enable enterprises to deliver new capabilities and services or deliver differentiated experiences to customers.

The day got started with a presentation from Toby Redshaw, SVP of 5G and Innovation. Toby started the discussion by highlighting a familiar theme, that the speed of technology transitions is accelerating. He referenced the fourth industrial revolution occurring, which he noted as the “Real-time Enterprise,” but importantly noted that instead of this industrial revolution taking 50 to 60 years, this one would happen much faster, perhaps in the next five to six years. He noted the need for enterprises to operate in real time, which we have seen evidence of as organizations distribute compute to the edge. This also provides a solid entry point for a high bandwidth, ultra-low latency solution like 5G.