Zeus Kerravala

Saying the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world is about as massive an understatement as can be. It hasn’t been just societal and business-process changes; IT organizations have gone through one of the most profound changes ever. I’ve been in tech since the mid-’80s, and the only thing that can even come close to this […]

Earlier this month, collaboration market leader Cisco Systems held its first-ever WebexOne virtual conference, an event filled with product news as Cisco announced a veritable cornucopia of new features—many of which enabled by artificial intelligence. During his keynote, Cisco’s new SVP of Applications and Security, Jeetu Patel, presented the company strategy for collaboration, which is […]

Arista Networks on Dec. 8 announced its DANZ (Data ANalyZer) Monitoring Fabric (DMF) available on its switching fabrics. In February, Arista acquired Big Switch Networks, which brought network packet broker (NPB) capabilities. While there are plenty of NPBs available, such as the ones available from Gigamon and NetScout, Big Switch had one distinction in that […]

Juniper Networks this week announced its intent to acquire Apstra, a pioneer in data center intent-based networking (IBN). IBN has been gaining momentum during the past few years as organizations begin to move to fully autonomous networks.  While most of the mainstream network vendors have some variation of an IBN solution today, Apstra is the […]

It’s fair to say the contact center market was one that basically stood still for decades. There were a handful of vendors that offered on-premises solutions that met the needs of most customers. But then along came the cloud, it introduced a number of new companies, and innovation exploded. One of the benefits that SaaS […]

This week network startup Celona became the first network vendor to offer a cellular wireless solution designed specifically for businesses. The offering is based on the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, which is what I expect most private 5G vendors to use. However, Celona is simplifying end-to-end operations through the use of AI orchestration, […]

There’s little debate that graphics processor unit manufacturer NVIDIA is the de facto standard when it comes to providing silicon to power machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) based systems. As important as Intel was to general-purpose computing, NVIDIA is the same to accelerated computing. Its GPUs can be found in everything from big-data […]

From a societal perspective, the year 2020 will be known as the year of COVID-19. In networking, 2020 will be remembered as the year of secure-access service edge (SASE), which builds on software-defined WANs (SD-WANs). The shift from a legacy network to an SD-WAN is the biggest evolutionary shift in networking in more than 30 […]

Earlier this month, I authored this post on the importance of quality machine data to improve analytics and security tools. High-quality data isn’t created out of the air, however, and I noted that it requires a new approach to machine data management. While there are vendors that currently claim to do this, the legacy vendors […]

The virtual events roll on; last week was the digital version of Cisco’s Partner Summit. Although the conference is geared toward Cisco’s massive reseller base, there are always a number of new products and feature updates that are of interest to customers. With the COVID-19 pandemic having come in fast, people have changed the way […]

High-performance network vendor Arista Networks this week introduced an upgrade to its Cognitive Campus portfolio for enterprise networks. The company’s Cognitive Campus vision is to simplify networks through the use of artificial intelligence and automation. Initially, the use-value proposition for it revolved around better-performing networks in the enterprise, which would then lead to optimized application […]

Edge router market share leader Cisco Systems this week announced a new line of infrastructure to address the changing needs of the SD-WANs and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) deployments.  For years, Cisco’s integrated services routers (ISRs) and aggregation services routers (ASRs) have been the gold standard for edge infrastructure and hold well over 80% […]