ESG Blogs

Extreme networks just announced its Q4 2018 earnings and it showed that the company missed the revenue estimate and lowered guidance for Q1 2019. The market reacted quickly by knocking the stock down.

At the start of the year I wrote about the network becoming more relevant in 2018. As the year has progressed, I am even more convinced that this is true. In fact, as organizations transform themselves to become more agile and responsive to their customers, IT teams are reimagining their roles. Are they really about information technology or rather about ensuring that every employee, customer, partner or machine can connect to an application, service, or each other, regardless of location or technology.

As organizations continue to adopt cloud computing in its various forms – IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS - the network will be critical to ensure success. Equally relevant is the fact that the “pendulum” is now swinging towards decentralization – meaning compute and applications are being deployed at the edge or in the cloud. Branch offices are connecting directly to the cloud and not routing through centralized data centers. All of which is putting increased pressure on the network to ensure availability, performance, and security.

A number of articles surfaced last Friday about AWS selling network switching infrastructure used in its own environment to enterprises. This news had a ripple effect in the market as some of the major network companies saw a dip in their stock prices.

If the sources are accurate, AWS is, at the very least, contemplating this strategy. If it decides to enter the market, this could be highly disruptive to the status quo. Let’s take a minute to think about this, though--it’s not like AWS will be selling data center network switches online – well, at least not yet - I actually just checked and didn’t see any Prime Day specials. If they are seriously considering entering this market, it does highlight a number of things that AWS may have to do to capture the on-premises enterprise market share.

While at HPE Discover 2018, I had the opportunity to sit down with Doug Crawford from Warner Bros. Entertainment. As it turns out, Warner Bros. Entertainment is one of HPE Aruba’s oldest customers. We discussed how they were leveraging  HPE Aruba solutions, how their environment has evolved and how they plan to leverage HPE Aruba solutions in the future to enhance the experience at the studios.

This year’s Discover event was the first time the 20-year HPE employee and engineer, Antonio Neri took the stage as President and CEO. Antonio was engaging and humble – a very approachable CEO, he seemed to be acutely aware of the HP legacy, but is determined to drive HPE forward.

In this video, I speak with Rajiv Mirani of Nutanix at the .NEXT conference about one of their latest acquisitions, Netsil, a digital native application performance management solution built specifically for containers and microservices. Learn about its different approach to collecting information and providing actionable information. We discuss how this innovative solution fits into the Nutanix mutli-cloud strategy and how customers will benefit from it, and Rajiv provides some insight into how the technology will evolve to better serve hybrid cloud environments by integrating with Nutanix FLOW and the role it will have automating brownfield segmentation. 

I was able to catch up with Binny Gill at the Nutanix .NEXT conference to have a quick discussion about one of their newest product announcements – Beam. This announcement is important in many aspects as it is Nutanix’s first SaaS offering and serves as the foundation for its customers to truly understand multi- cloud environments. Organizations can leverage Beam to fully understand their cloud footprint, costs, and compliance with best practices. Binny also shares some examples of how customers are leveraging Beam and provides some insight into where Nutanix will leverage it in the future.

In my second networking conversation with Bob Laliberte, part of the ongoing ESG 360 Video Series, we concentrate on how networking can be aligned with - and help to drive - business objectives; with step one being the provisioning of information (analytics, ML, and AI) and step two being an active system (programmable automation to limit or preclude manual steps). When combined, these constitute the major elements of what is often spoken of as “intent-based networking” - in simple terms, you can think of this as traditional static network plumbing transitioning to become a contemporary dynamic part of optimizing application outcomes.

Last week, Pure took advantage of the historic Bill Graham Civic Center and auditorium to host its annual customer and analyst event, Pure Accelerate 2018. Accelerate is a good choice for Pure as 2017 marked its first year with over one billion dollars in revenue as an independent company. A feat it accomplished in 8 short years.

IT has probably never been more complex and demanding than today: even as approaches such as convergence, myriad clouds, containers and software-definition (etc.) seek to make operations simpler, so to a degree such elements can also obfuscate some of the underlying subtleties and opportunities of the foundational components. After all, while it’s great to focus on purchasing - for instance - application service levels or business outcomes, some understanding of the IT elements (and considerations or choices) that contribute to those is also often useful. That is the purpose of this video discussion series: it offers ESG’s subject matter experts discussing some of the key trends, drivers, and considerations across various IT areas. We aim to do it succinctly and to deliver it in engaging, plain English - while also tying each technology area back to its eventual potential to positively impact both IT and business results.