EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

What is Fungible, Inc., the new startup created by Juniper Networks’ founder Pradeep Sindhu, working on?

It’s hard to believe there was actually a time before mobile devices. It wasn’t even all that long ago. In fact, this month Apple is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. While the iPhone was not the first smartphone, its introduction is credited with kick-starting the mobile revolution and initiating the “consumerization of IT,” forever changing how technology is developed, marketed, and utilized in business environments. In trying to relate these historical milestones to Millennials, I find myself more and more sounding like a crotchety old man: “Back in my day, we only had PCs—and we were glad to have ‘em, too!” Today, three-quarters of all business workers regularly use mobile devices to perform job tasks, so my nostalgic recollections of PC-only business environments are increasingly falling on disinterested ears.

Back when Dell EMC was still just known as Dell, its networking business staked out a leadership position by becoming the first mainstream switch manufacturer to embrace bare-metal data center switching. Now it’s moving into the bare-metal campus switching market, too.

Avaya will restructure its debt under the protection of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The company aims to emerge from this action intact with minimal impact on customers. However, it is very possible that Avaya will sell its network infrastructure business.

Software-defined networking (SDN) exploded onto the scene five years ago with a tremendous amount of hype, but the transition from hype to reality has been a little less explosive. Most enterprises are still in evaluation mode with SDN.

[Editors Note: This blog post is sponsored by Infosim^®, but the ideas expressed here are entirely my own]

This sponsored blog post was originally published at at HelpSystems.com

The industry has seen plenty of marchitectures from Cisco and its peers over the years. Its newest one, Digital Network Architecture (DNA), feels different, especially after I spent a week at Cisco Live 2016. DNA is different because underneath all the slideware and demos is an apparent commitment to changing the way enterprises do networking. In other words, Cisco wants network engineers to rely less on their skills with its command line interface (CLI).

[Editor’s note: This blog is sponsored by Infosim^®, but the content is entirely my own]

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by HelpSystems on February  2, 2016.