ESG Blogs

I attended the Big 5G event in Denver Colorado last week. The show was well attended, with every session I went to, including keynotes, having standing room only. That is probably a good indicator of the level of interest in and even to a certain degree the level of hype surrounding 5G.

The keynotes had representatives from major North American CSPs, including ATT, C-Spire, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon (alphabetically). While there was plenty of “we were first in this 5G category” claims from two of these vendors and commentary about other countries' deployments that would lead you to believe this was a race, one of the speakers echoed a comment from a recent DARPA show that probably sums up the transition to 5G best, in that 5G is an evolution, not a race. Indeed, comments from the other major vendors stated that they did not want to release a 5G solution until they are ready, which they assured us they will be soon. In fact, CTIA stated there will be 92 5G deployments in 2019. Across all of IT, we have seen technology adoption accelerating, and 5G is no different, so expect the 5G adoption rate to be the fastest yet. ATT cited an example that a new deployment would typically be 18 mos, but for their first roll out, it was only six months.

Spring brings things you expect – tax day (in the US), storms and showers (in much of the Northern hemisphere), and some variant of Dell/EMC/Dell Technologies World (in whatever Las Vegas is!). But this Spring brought something unexpected too – at Dell Technologies World the discussion for the closing general session panel centered on “optimism and happiness in the digital age.” So there!

Dell Tech World kicked off in Vegas this week, capturing the attention of 15,000 attendees from over 122 different countries.

The big announcements in the day one keynote were focused on Hybrid Cloud, the Microsoft Azure partnership, and unified workspace, but the underlying theme was clear. Dell Technologies is continuing to embrace its “Better Together” philosophy creating solutions from its family of companies. This is evidenced by its solutions that leverage technology from VMware, Dell EMC, SecureWorks etc., wrapped into a single bundle.

NetScout recently held its Customer Event: Engage19 in Nashville TN. Situated in the Opryland hotel (now called the Gaylord Opryland), there were approximately 800 attendees from over 350 companies coming to hear about the latest from NETSCOUT, meet with key executives, and learn from technical experts.

Last week Intel hosted a group of press and analysts to learn about its Data Centric Innovation launch. Driven by the proliferation of cloud computing, growth in AI and analytics, and the cloudification of the network and the edge, Intel released a number of new technologies to help organizations process, store, and move all the data that is being created.  

I spent a few days on the sunny Las Vegas strip with the team from Aruba last week at its annual customer event - Atmosphere 19. This year’s attendance recorded almost two thousand attendees and eight hundred partners. Aruba continues to grow and provided some stats to support that, citing over 1Billion switch ports, 15M access ports, 500,000 customers, 90,000 or so Airheads, and over 4000 patents. HPE Aruba is now at three billion in revenues and looking towards future growth that would get them to five billion.

Its that time of the year again when we try to predict the future based on everything we have seen and heard over the course of the prior year (or years). This is a fun exercise that makes us put on our thinking caps and try to determine how new technologies or initiatives will help to shape the upcoming year.

IT organizations need to be responsive to the business. Digital transformation, IoT, and cloud computing initiatives require the underlying IT environment (HW and SW) to be able to react quickly and scale seamlessly, but it can’t do that if your technical resources are spending more time getting the proper licenses correct. This is especially impactful in fast growing companies.

I recently attended Juniper’s NXTWORK 2018 event in sunny Las Vegas. Well, I assume it was sunny--as most of these events go, most of my time was spent in the convention center. Juniper has had a number of key additions to its executive team since last year and we are now starting to see the results of those shifts. Most noticeable this year was the focus on enterprise customers and enabling them to drive operational efficiency into their multi-cloud environments.

Our networking analyst, Bob Laliberte, has recently written about connectivity and experience. In today’s networking world, connecting end-users to a network is simply not enough. The focus is shifting to end-user experience once connected to that network.

Those who connect to some network daily know what I mean. I’ve had to connect to our network and edit documents while on the road. I’ve been in a running store wanting to buy some gear, but because I was overwhelmed with choices, I checked online reviews before I made my purchase. Most times, I have had no issue. But there have been times when the experience of trying to do my work or get information became frustrating. In most cases, I gave up and went elsewhere, just so that I could find a place with “good” connectivity.