ESG Blogs

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.

VMware held its flagship customer event, VMworld 2019, in San Francisco last week.

It was a big week for VMware, especially since it was coming on the heels of announcing two significant acquisitions of Pivotal and Carbon Black. Much of the news this year centered on the desire to embrace containers and manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Along those lines, the big announcements included:

And responsible for creating positive experiences

For almost a century we have relied on classic hardwired phones to conduct business, collaborate, and be more productive. From a work perspective, perhaps there are still a few out there who remember how getting off a plane was quickly followed by a trip to the bank of pay phones (see image, for those who have never seen one) to check for messages and make any required calls. When you went to the office, an essential piece of hardware was the hardwired telephone on your desk. The phone was critical because when you picked it up, it gave you a reassuring dial tone that let you know you were connected to the world.

Early in my high-tech career, SUN Microsystems was thought of as a computing visionary. SUN coined an intriguing company tagline early on, "the network is the computer." What did this mean? That IT infrastructure was linked together in a loosely coupled architecture, tied together via networking technologies like Ethernet cables and the TCP/IP protocol. Thus, it was critical to engineer the network correctly to maximize network availability, performance, and business benefits.

Extreme will be celebrating the 4^th of July holiday with its latest acquisition, Aerohive. In what seems to be a trend for Extreme, it was able to pick up the company for a good price (especially when compared to other recent WiFi acquisitions). The big difference, however, is that in this case it did not just acquire the assets, but rather the whole company. Translation – this one should be a bit smoother, more predictable and hopefully lacking surprises!

The big news in Las Vegas this week was HPE’s decision to go all in on “as a service.” Emboldened by its success with GreenLake, Antonio Neri announced the entire HPE portfolio would be available “as a service” by 2022. To be clear, HPE will continue to sell products via traditional CapEx methods, as well, offering its customers choice. Its premise is that it believes that cloud is not a destination, but rather it is an experience and so this announcement challenges the notion that cloud first equals public cloud only, and deliver the same cloud experience with Greenlake. The new “as a service” option will include subscription, pay-per-use and consumption models and fall under the GreenLake brand.

Last week, I attended Cisco Live US in San Diego to hear the latest and greatest from Cisco executives and technology leaders. Following Cisco’s campus refresh a couple of months ago, the company continued to execute against its Intent-based networking imperative with a number of announcements aimed at making your network solutions smarter, simpler, and more secure.

Have you ever thought of what 50 tons of ewaste would look like? Probably not, but that is the amount of ewaste expected to be generated this year. To put it into perspective, I was recently told that much waste would be equivalent to 4500 Eiffel towers, basically enough to cover all of Manhattan. Even more important, ewaste is only 2% of our overall waste, but makes up 70% of our toxic waste.

This week Extreme hosted customers for its second annual customer event, Extreme Connect. Reflective of its own growth, conference attendees doubled in size this year and that was evidenced by its packed keynotes and technology breakouts. The theme for this year’s event was #FutureForward.