Zeus Kerravala

Software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) are moving out of the early adopter phase into mass adoption. To date, the majority of deployments have been by organizations that lean toward a do-it-yourself model. These are typically technically advanced organizations willing to assume some risks and bumps along the way to be first to market. Including SD-WAN, this will […]

The internet is easily the most pervasive network on the planet, but there have always been questions regarding its ability to be a business resource. The primary issue is that there really is no “internet” or single owner. Rather it’s a collection of interconnected networks that make up the massive super network we know today. […]

IoT, or internet of things, is still an emerging technology as IT and business leaders struggle with understanding how the world changes when everything is connected. The one area of IoT where connecting things has been commonplace for more than a decade is the industrial IoT (IIoT) world. Building control systems, factory equipment, machinery and […]

It’s fair to say the network today is more important than any time in history. Digital transformation is dominating the business world and companies are bringing in new technologies such as the cloud, IoT, WiFi6, 5G and artificial intelligence. All of these have exactly one thing in common: They are network-centric in nature, so the […]

VMWorld 2019 is in the books now, and as is the case with previous incarnations of the event, we were treated a wide range of new products from the host company and its partners. One of the more intriguing partner announcements that flew under the radar was from intent-based networking (IBN) vendor Apstra, whose product […]

Last week virtualization giant VMware held its VMWorld 2019 user conference in San Francisco. The 23,000 or so attendees were treated to notable innovation the virtualization from the host company as well as its many partners. One of the more interesting announcements that I believe flew under the radar was the joint NVIDIA–VMware initiative to […]

With slot machines, getting three cherries typically pays off big. With Cisco Systems’ contact center business, the company needs merely one cloud-delivered cherry to win big by advancing its Cognitive Collaboration vision in its contact center solution. This week Cisco announced its intention to acquire privately held CloudCherry to bring better customer experience management (CEM) […]

A few years back, Walker Research came out with a study reporting that by 2020, customer experience (CX) standards will overtake price and every other factor to be the top brand differentiator. This was certainly a bold prediction, although it proved to be conservative. My own research shows that it’s already the top differentiator. Evidence […]

The long-awaited debut of Slack as publicly traded company finally arrived on June 20, 2019. The company eschewed the commonly used initial public offering (IPO) route in favor of a direct listing. This method is significantly cheaper than an IPO and avoids any share dilution, but the company raises no money, which is why most […]

Before the market opened today (June 26), Extreme Networks announced its intent to acquire Aerohive Networks. Extreme is paying a purchase price of $4.45 per share in cash, which represents about a 40% premium on the opening stock price. This equates to a total price of about $272 million, but Aerohive has about $62 million […]

Cisco Live 2019 was held June 9-13 in San Diego, and I was fortunate enough to attend the event. I’ve been attending Cisco Live (formerly known as Networkers) for more than 20 years now and have seen the show grow from a small niche technical conference to one of the largest IT shows in the […]

Queue up Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long”: “It was 1989, my thoughts were short, my hair was long, caught somewhere between a boy and man.” What’s this have to do with networking? In addition to “Singing Sweet home Alabama all summer long,” 1989 was the year that Cisco held its first-ever Networkers customer event. Only […]