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Bob: As 2019 rolls into the history books, it's time to evaluate how networking has evolved this year, and think about what organizations can expect in 2020. This year witnessed the initial deployments of 5G networks, the rollout of Wi-Fi 6, there were continued mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of new chipsets that enabled greater throughput up to 400 gig and greater emphasis on the end-to-end networking.

It also witnessed a lot of underlay and overlay integration and, of course, intent-based networking. Network automation continued to progress as SD-WAN deployments made more progress on their way up to becoming ubiquitous. I have a number of predictions for 2020, and we'll share one of them with you now. Network automation will be required to overcome the complexity in the environments today.

As the IT pendulum swings to distributed and edge computing in order to support real-time analytics, network environments are becoming even more complex. As a result, vendors are looking to offer common OS in management systems that enable them to drive more automation into the network, and create more operational efficiencies in order to drive higher levels of customer productivity.

Moving forward, organizations won't be able to rely on individual acts of heroism, but rather they'll need to evolve to more automated, self-optimizing and self-healing network environments. And this would include capabilities such as one-touch or zero-touch provisioning, network policy enforcement along with anything that can help organizations eliminate time-intensive manual CLI commands.

Certainly, 2020 is shaping up to be another good year for innovation. And given the rapid pace of digital transformation and distributed compute environments, the network will be increasingly important for the business and its ability to deliver positive customer experiences. To see the rest of my predictions, please go to the ESG website.