ESG Blogs

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.

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!