Zeus Kerravala

This week startup Alkira emerged from stealth mode. The company launched an on demand multi-cloud network as-a-service that lets you deploy and provision a secure, unified global cloud network infrastructure, in under an hour. The founders of the company are two people that are no strangers to network innovation as they were the founders of […]

The global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is causing companies to rethink their distributed workforce strategy. Thousands of businesses have moved to work-from-home environments as employees adapt to new ways of communicating and collaborating with each other. This shift presents new challenges for IT departments, such as connecting a distributed, remote workforce to business apps and services […]

On March 31, network security provider Palo Alto Networks (PAN) announced its intent to acquire software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) pioneer CloudGenix for about $420 million in cash. This is a healthy, albeit fair, premium for a company that has an estimated revenue of $45 million with about 250 customers.  For context, VMware paid roughly the […]

The COVID-19 pandemic hit businesses quickly. Government mandates and trying to protect employees caused companies to scramble and dictate that all employees work from home. One of the byproducts of this action is that organizations have embraced software as a service (SaaS) faster than ever before. Cloud-delivered applications are accessible from everywhere and can be […]

Cisco Systems Senior Vice-President and General Manager of its DevNet program, Susie Wee, recently provided an update to a handful of analysts on the program’s changes and momentum. For those not familiar with DevNet, it’s Cisco’s developer program. One might ask a series of questions, such as: Why does Cisco need a developer program? Don’t […]

Last week Cisco Systems surprised the IT networking industry when it announced a restructuring of its technology leadership team. The lead story was the departure of its executive vice president and general manager of networking and security, David Goeckeler, who is now the new CEO of Western Digital.  I’ve been asked if this move was […]

The world’s largest security conference, RSA, came and went earlier this month at its normal home in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. There was some speculation the show might be canceled due to Verizon, AT&T and IBM pulling out, but the show went on with more than 40,000 people, myself included, coming to learn […]

Consider this: Ransomware attacks take place every 14 seconds and have increased by 700% since 2016. Such attacks—where malicious software blocks access to the production data until payment is made—cost companies around $11 billion in financial, productivity and downtime losses in 2019. Attack prevention is necessary but not sufficient Many companies focus their efforts on preventing […]

High-performance network vendor Arista Networks last week announced it had acquired Big Switch Networks. The announcement was made during its fourth-quarter financial earnings call, which was solid despite some volatility with the cloud vendors. Big Switch was one of the pioneers in software-defined networking (SDN) and has raised north of $120 million since it was […]

Gone are the days when all applications and systems were centralized in data centers and IT departments had direct power over the user experience. Cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) changed all that, giving companies a cost-effective alternative to running apps in-house. What many infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders didn’t see coming is the lack of […]

SASE (secure access service edge) vendor Open Systems on Jan. 28 announced it was acquiring Swiss-based Sqooba, an AI-based IT analytics and visibility vendor. Open Systems will use Sqooba to enhance its SASE platform to include end-to-end visibility. The timing for Open Systems is good, because SD-WANs are quickly evolving to SASE. SD-WANs obviously have […]

SD-WANs (software-defined wide-area networks) are often praised for uniting the network and security functions into one solution, but there is actually a bigger story of convergence. Recently, some vendors and solutions are converging the network, security and artificial intelligence under the SD-WAN umbrella, giving way for AI-powered insights, virtual assistants and augmented management. With these […]