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Clients trust us across their GTMs—from strategy and product development to competitive insights and content creation—because we deliver high-quality, actionable support.
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Fresh off my trip to Dallas for IBM Think, I am reminded how much I enjoy the intimacy offered by these smaller regional events. Unlike their global counterparts, you can often get a closer look at the interaction between a vendor and its customers along with better insight into how IT leaders are handling their own transformation journeys. This setting was a wonderful complement to IBM’s theme of “Let’s create.”
Creation in business often requires combining the right technology with the right expertise. Historically, IT organizations tended to maintain the needed expertise in-house and would look to the vendor community for the right technology. Given the pace, scale, and complexity of modern IT, however, businesses often can’t meet their demands for expertise relying solely on in-house experts anymore. IT leaders have had to turn to third parties to fill in the gaps. And frankly, there is a scarcity of expertise in tech today. We see it in our research into pervasive skill shortages and IT personnel consistently being asked to assume more responsibilities.
IT vendors, such as IBM, that can offer a multi-cloud, multi-partner perspective that is customer-centric, and not just technology-centric, deliver tremendous value. The level of complexity in modern multi-cloud environments is so great, however, that one vendor, or even one cloud provider can often not cover everything alone.
IBM recognizes this challenge and opportunity. Its “Let’s create” message is not only an open invitation to collaborate, but also an acknowledgement IBM will work to integrate the right partners as well. Technology combined with the right expertise from the right partners is a powerful message, one that IBM is embracing.
For additional insights from IBM Think, please check out the video below.
Cisco Live! returned to Las Vegas on June 12-16. Getting back to in-person events has been refreshing and seeing remote colleagues and friends for the first time in a long while at this event was invaluable. (more…)
On June 15-17, Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group held an analyst summit highlighting the state of the business as well as its future direction. Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President Lenovo, President Infrastructure Solutions Group, kicked off the event by discussing the company’s four decades of innovation as well as the current data economy. (more…)
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 did not disappoint and has picked up from last year. This event was held both virtually and live in Valencia, Spain, May 16-20, and included over 26,000 registered attendees, from developers, product management, DevOps, IT ops, architects, and executives. There were over 9,000 companies in attendance across multiple industries.
CiscoLive returned to being an in-person event this year and customers responded positively, with 16 thousand showing up to the Mandalay Bay Resort to partake in keynotes, sessions, training, and festivities.
It was great to be in person and able to interact with members of the Cisco executive, technical, and analyst teams, as well as meet with their customers. It also provided me with an opportunity to connect with fellow ESG analysts Rob Strechay and Paul Nashawaty, who were also attending the event.
There were a number of significant networking announcements made during the event, so I will try to encapsulate them in this blog and provide my insights. They included:
The Merakification of Catalyst switches – Part One. With Todd Nightingale in charge of enterprise networking, we are now seeing the introduction of cloud-based management for Catalyst switches (and eventually APs) leveraging the Meraki cloud-based management solution – hands down recognized as the pioneer in cloud-based network management and well known for its operational simplicity. Now, before Catalyst users leveraging DNA Center get too concerned, this is not a forced transition to cloud-based management. Rather, organizations should be thinking about this as an augmentation – the ability to leverage unified cloud-based monitoring of Meraki and Catalyst environments – which is especially helpful to those with highly distributed environments and those with hybrid environments consisting of Catalyst switches with Meraki APs. Even when using this “monitoring” mode, organizations can still use DNA Center to manage the Catalyst environment. Over time, this cloud-based capability will include the ability to manage Catalyst environments leveraging a simplified interface. Given that ESG research highlights that 40% currently have unified wired and wireless network management and another 48% plan to unify, the cloud-based offering is very timely.
Nexus will also offer cloud-based management and new switches. Using the InterSight platform, data center networking teams now have the option to leverage a cloud-based management solution for their data center networking environments. Again, this is about providing choice and management options for data center networking environments. Cisco also rolled out a new family of 400G switches to accommodate the steady growth of data. All switches are 800G-ready to ensure investment protection.
ThousandEyes integration continues with “Predictive Networking” – a great example of how organizations can leverage cloud-based intelligence to deliver better experiences. Essentially, ThousandEyes will analyze the network traffic and provide recommendations to improve performance and experience. Even more important, this technology is completely network-operator-driven, as the solution will demonstrate how much better the experience could be by allowing the operator the options to select a different route and then simply push a button to accept the recommendation and make the change. While this is fairly impressive on its own, the more intriguing part of this announcement was the comment that this intelligence engine could be ported to other areas of the network. Given that ThousandEyes is already connected to much of the Cisco portfolio, this technology could provide additional operational efficiencies for an organization’s end-to-end network environment.
All of these cloud-based announcements are key, as they serve to be a key enabler for greater levels of intelligence (AI/ML) and automation. Given that Cisco has such a massive installed based, the ability to anonymously collect and process all that data in the cloud will drive enormous operational efficiencies and deliver enhanced experiences for organizations. But Cisco customers need to embrace the cloud! I am looking forward to hearing about adoption rates and expect that those campus and branch environments will be more willing to shift – so many are already Meraki customers. I expect that change will be harder for those in the data center, but the transition needs to occur – these networking environments are becoming far too complicated to manage manually. Organizations need to embrace the intelligence that is enabled by cloud-based management. This doesn’t mean you have to switch everything over immediately, but you need to start using the technology to become comfortable with it. I think of this as the “time to comfort” with these advanced technologies – you need to trust that it will do what you would have done, and witness this repeatedly, before you make any advanced intelligence technology live in your environment. It will be critical to have a feedback loop between the network operators and the vendors to ensure algorithms are as efficient as possible.
Other notable announcements included a Cisco + Secure Connect that is a secure access service edge (SASE) offering that can be consumed as a service, leveraging Cisco SD-WAN and security capabilities to protect highly distributed environments. Zero trust for hybrid work was also discussed. For those who are not aware, Cisco has comprehensive security offerings, so zero trust isn’t a product SKU but rather a framework from which organizations can leverage Cisco security solutions to enable zero trust for hybrid work.
We were able to participate in a number of roundtable discussions and engage in one-on-one meetings as well. I had a great conversation with Matt MacPherson on the future of wireless, discussing WFI6/6E/7 and 5G. It was also great to meet with Lawrence Huang to discuss cloud-based network management..
Wrapping up, Cisco took a big step forward by expanding its use of cloud-based network management. It is a good first step and I look forward to tracking their progress by both adoption and capabilities. In particular, it would be great to get a holistic vision on the Cisco cloud strategy and how the Nexus cloud will integrate with the Meraki/Catalyst cloud as well as Viptela and ThousandEyes. Cisco has stated that this will be a journey and given the size of the Cisco portfolio and installed based, it is completely understandable that this journey will take some time.
When I think specifically about the developer viewpoint, VMware Tanzu comes to mind. In the throes of this merger between Broadcom and VMware, I find it a bit concerning that the financial momentum surrounding Tanzu has tapered off over the past year, given that it was once one of the highest-performing offerings in the VMware portfolio. According to the latest Enterprise Technology Research survey, Tanzu’s share of VMware’s business went from 49% in April 2021 to 32% in January 2022. By April 2022, that number fell to just 20%.
Now that VMware sits under the Broadcom banner, how will the future of cloud-native developers change? There has been markedly slow growth in the VMware developer community, which will be taken into consideration during the course of this acquisition. However, the declining interest in Tanzu over the past year suggests that VMware’s cloud-native developer community will take another big hit under the new regime.
Finally, there is a potential opportunity for Broadcom to expand and grow the VMware developer community to one that represents the entire software stack. The tools to make that happen are there in VMware’s portfolio; it depends on Broadcom to see the potential.
VMware is clearly more than a mundane cash cow in Broadcom’s eyes, but it remains to be seen where Broadcom plans to take VMware’s future. Whether that means expanding into emerging markets or staying true to the core business, Broadcom has its work cut out for it to stay competitive on the heels of this merger.
Last week, I got to attend Pure Accelerate. It was wonderful to be back in out in the world again, and experience the sights and sounds speaking to live people face to face. As for the event, there was a ton to like. I took some video at the event and added my thoughts in the video below, please check that out.
For a more detailed take on the Pure Accelerate event as well as the new announcements, please check out my blog on TechTarget.
Last week’s RSA Conference was an orgy of security innovation and industry hyperbole. While this will only make things more confusing for security professionals, they seem to be moving ahead with strategies for security technology consolidation, integration, and a migration to multi-product security platforms.
This week I flew to Nashville, TN to participate in ExtremeConnect 22 customer event. Despite Covid flare ups here and there, this event was very well attended – in fact it was sold out.
This was my second in-person event of 2022 and it is great to be back, as everyone gets so much more out of these events when together, and not just the ability to attend keynotes to feel the energy in the room, but the ability to attend training sessions, the opportunity for impromptu hallway meetings, getting access to executives and engineering talent, and the ability to interact socially with your peers.
ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada), Western Europe, Central/South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia between December 20, 2021 and December 31, 2021. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be information security managers, chief information officers, IT senior executives, IT managers/directors, or general IT staff responsible for information security and other comparable titles.
This Complete Survey Results presentation focuses on cybersecurity technology purchase trends, including the current threat landscape’s impact on strategies and subsequent buying decisions, efforts to consolidate vendors and products, the appetite for cybersecurity platforms, and cybersecurity process integration with DevOps practices.
End-users are increasingly relying on web browsers as their primary access to corporate applications and data. The most commonly used web browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari. Due to advances in technology, security, and internet speeds, browsers can provide several advantages in a corporate environment compared to PC and mobile operating systems. Yet browser security remains a major issue among IT professionals charged with managing security patches, updates, and policies as part of an overall end-user computing (EUC) strategy. As businesses accelerate the adoption of applications accessed through web browsers, and IT continues to improve support and security for multiple browsers, enterprises may one day treat browsers as the de facto operating system in a corporate environment.
The significant performance and bandwidth advantages of 5G cellular networks have numerous implications for businesses as well as consumers. 5G has the potential to deliver reliable connections for hybrid work and collaboration strategies while enabling augmented reality and other multimedia applications to run on a wider range of endpoints and locations. To realize these opportunities, IT leaders should consider 5G integral to their network infrastructure plans and strategies.
Last week’s RSA Conference was an orgy of security innovation and industry hyperbole. While this will only make things more confusing for security professionals, they seem to be moving ahead with strategies for security technology consolidation, integration, and a migration to multi-product security platforms.
This week I flew to Nashville, TN to participate in ExtremeConnect 22 customer event. Despite Covid flare ups here and there, this event was very well attended – in fact it was sold out.