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Hi, I'm Dan Conde, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, covering networking and cloud platforms. Here are some of my thoughts about what we'll expect to see and what you ought to do in the year 2018. There are several areas that are a particular interest to me. One is SDWAN. And the belief is that rather than having SDWAN being a single product with a single solution set, I'm beginning to believe that there will be at least three ways in which people are going to be deploying it, a do it yourself solution in the enterprise where you buy a product and deploy it, just like you always had for the branch. The other solution is to get from a large telecommunications vendor where they provide the bandwidth, the equipment in a service altogether. And then the third one is to get it from a managed service provider who would OEM or acquire the software under license from a traditional network software vendor, get bandwidth from another vendor, and they provide the services in which they would custom-design the solution for the purposes of the enterprise customer.

I think three of those are similar, yet will eventually evolve to have very different needs and products may actually change over time. So, it's really incumbent for the enterprises to determine what are their own particular needs, whether it's anything from security, lowering costs, agility, and find a right solution set that meets their needs... and right way forward in 2018. The other thing that I'm looking for is to understand how cloud networking will affect their own enterprise networking. It could be things like network visibility where you don't know exactly how the network is running in the cloud compared to traditional methods done within the data center, where you could apply network monitoring tools to understand precisely what's going on. And those tools are not yet perfectly available in the cloud, but a lot of vendors are coming up with products that allow the same type of monitoring to appear on the public cloud as well as on the data center with consistency across both sides.

So, I would look for new solutions coming out right now that have been already introduced in 2017 and as they mature in 2018 as well. And finally, I think that the interesting thing to understand is that networking is very important for cloud providers and enterprise. And it's important to realize that just because you have connectivity doesn't mean that you have the right kind of networking. There are cases where you have IOT devices. There are other cases where you do want to make sure that you have the fastest connections between a public cloud provider like Microsoft, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Amazon AWS and making sure that you have good connectivity. So, good colocation facilities would have the right kind of latency requirements that you may need so that locating the data center and your workloads in the right place will give you the right kind of connectivity and performance characteristics for your workloads. So, those are the three things that I think you ought to look at and a bit of a prediction on things as they will evolve in 2018. So, I'm Dan Conde with the Enterprise Strategy Group. Thank you.