As CES wound down, industry watchers are now turning their attention to the National Retail Federation show across the country in New York. Retail, once is slow moving industry, is now ripe with change and the in-store environments have become operationally more complex.
I’m a big fan of any technology that makes our lives easier. One example of this is Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which I consider to be the easiest check out experience available today. Customers tap their credit card on a reader, walk in a store, pick up whatever they want and then, as the name suggests, just walk out of the store and everything is charged to your account.
High-performance network provider Arista Networks Inc. today announced the next wave of innovations for its campus network solutions. The new products include expansion of its Virtual ES with Path Aliasing, or VESPA, offering, which will make it easier for businesses to deploy large-scale mobility domains. The Santa Clara networking company also announced it is expanding its Autonomous Virtual Assistant, or AVA, its agentic artificial intelligence solution, to help organizations streamline AI operations use cases.
I’ve seen many digital transformation efforts, but one recent example was unique: At the recent Cisco Systems Inc. Partner Summit event, I sat down with Grady Nichols, senior director of information technology operations at Mercy Ships, and Rob Kim, chief technology officer at Presidio Inc., and discussed how the two organizations are partnering with each other and Cisco to transform the way healthcare is delivered in underserved areas.
There is a lot of hype around 5G these days, and for good reason, as it promises faster data speeds, lower latency and wider coverage to support a wide range of wireless applications such as remote medicine and autonomous warehouses. With these advancements, I’ve noticed the chatter around 5G as a Wi-Fi replacement, begging the question: Do we still need Wi-Fi?