Extreme Networks turns 30 years old this year, and its recent Connect event in Orlando celebrated many of its achievements. Not surprisingly, AI-driven operations were a big theme, and it is abundantly clear that the company is focusing its efforts on delivering better business outcomes and improved network operational efficiency rather than just competing on speeds and feeds. With a continued theme of summarizing my event insights with three big takeaways – let’s dive in! Extreme Platform ONE’s Agentic Journey At Extreme Connect, executives spent considerable time discussing how AI can reduce operational burden across wired, wireless, and fabric environments. Enterprise networking teams continue to struggle with complexity, and cloud-managed…
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To say that the number of product, customer, and partner announcements at Google Cloud Next 2026 was significant is an understatement. A dizzying 260 introductions across 700-plus breakout sessions punctuated an underlying theme of enabling improved business outcomes within the agentic enterprise. The event also clearly demonstrated that Google is quickly moving beyond cloud services imbued with AI to become an AI-native infrastructure solution provider that is leaning into security, networking, and silicon to deliver a tightly integrated AI stack. With a continued theme of summarizing my event insights with three big takeaways – let’s dive in! Flipping Security From Detection To Autonomous Defense At the event, Google introduced three new…
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Fortinet welcomed a record number of attendees to its Accelerate 2026 event in Las Vegas. I had the opportunity to spend a full day with the company’s leadership team and customers, learning more about the firewall category leader and its broad, deep portfolio of secure networking solutions. With the theme of summarizing my event attendance with three big takeaways, let’s dive in! FortiOS 8.0 And FortiSOC Two big announcements punctuated Accelerate 2026. First, the introduction of FortiOS 8.0 builds on the company’s investment in the operating system launched nearly 25 years ago, which powers its security fabric. Enhancements include AI runtime security controls, SASE enhancements, and new quantum-safe capabilities. From…
