Zeus Kerravala

The majority of business applications have shifted to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.  Today, it’s commonplace to buy CRM, expense management, accounting software and almost everything else as a cloud-based service. However, the communications industry, particularly contact centers, has been slow to catch the cloud wave. There are many reasons for this, the biggest of which […]

For as long as we have had service providers, there have been these things called service-level agreements, or SLAs.  Although service providers offer SLAs, they rarely factor into a customer’s decision-making process. In fact, when I hear SLAs, the first thing that comes to my mind is Ralph Kramden saying, “Har, har, hardy har har!” […]

Hewlett Packard Enterprise on July 13 revealed its intention to acquire SD-WAN and WAN optimization vendor Silver Peak for $925 million. In its announcement, HPE said Silver Peak will be rolled into the Aruba business unit, now known as HPE’s Intelligent Edge division and headed up by Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s founder. This is certainly no […]

Application delivery controller (ADC) market leader F5 Networks this week revealed a unique offering that uses SmartNICs to improve the performance of the security capabilities in its virtual product. This is a turnkey solution that consists of a BIG-IP AFM Virtual Edition (VE) integrated with an Intel FPGA PAC N3000 SmartNIC (network interface card). The […]

Enterprises are especially vulnerable during a pandemic crisis like the current one, since the majority of employees working from home open up new vulnerabilities—everything from shadow IT to unmanaged devices to unsecured internet access. Because companies are at an increased risk for cyberattacks, safeguarding networks and systems is more crucial than ever. To address today’s […]

This week the digital version of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2020) kicked off. As part of the event, GPU (graphics processing unit) market leader NVIDIA made a number of announcements that strengthen its position as a key player in the supercomputing industry. The scientific computing aspects of supercomputing have changed over the years, and […]

Cisco Systems held its first all-digital user event, Cisco Live, this week. The online event wisely was rescheduled from two weeks ago, because Cisco leadership did not want the event to distract from the social issues created by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. The interesting twist is that Cisco’s event was […]

The well-known quote “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” attributed to the great Wayne Gretzky is often used in business vernacular, because it’s illustrative of why it’s critical to continually change a business based on market trends. Never has that quote been more apropos for companies in the […]

This week Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, held its digital version of its Atmosphere user event. The conference is typically the venue that Aruba makes big announcements and this year was no exception. The highlight of Aruba’s event, CEO/founder Keerti Melkote’s keynote, was the unveiling of its Edge Services Platform, a cloud-native platform […]

Network behemoth Cisco Systems has announced its intent to acquire performance monitoring provider ThousandEyes. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly slowed down parts of the economy, but not so Cisco’s acquisition machine. While no purchase price was given, earlier in the day Bloomberg speculated it was in the $1 billion range.  This may seem like a […]