For years, the “wall” between storage and networking administrators has been a fixture of the enterprise data center. I spent the early part of my career as a network engineer and the arena of storage was a bit of a black box, and for most companies, that’s still the case. This is because these networks operated differently.
The initial phase of the artificial intelligence gold rush was defined by “The Build.” Hyperscalers and model builders raced to secure every available Nvidia Corp. H100 GPU, constructing massive, centralized cathedrals of compute. But as the industry descends from the peak of inflated expectations toward real-world utility, the conversation is shifting. AI is moving from the lab to the factory floor, the retail aisle and the telco edge.
For years, the industry conversation around stadium technology has been stuck on a single, albeit important, metric: How many thousands of fans can simultaneously post a selfie to Instagram? Though the “connected stadium” was once a differentiator, it has rapidly become a baseline requirement. I recently talked to the leadership at Ruckus Networks and the Los Angeles Football Club about the recent deployment of Wi-Fi 7 at BMO Stadium (pictured), and one of the big takeaways is the narrative around high-density Wi-Fi has shifted.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. announced new networking, compute hardware, cloud operations software and financing updates for service providers at this past week’s MWC26 in Barcelona. The updates center on meeting the new demands being created by artificial intelligence reshaping every aspect of network design — from centralized data centers to distributed edge environments.
Cisco Systems Inc. has long been regarded as the market leader in networking, but over the past few years, the company has strived to position itself as “critical infrastructure for the artificial intelligence era.” It now seems to be making headway with that as the stock hits an all-time high. This week at Cisco Live EMEA, in Amsterdam, Cisco delivered another payload of innovation targeted at helping customers move their AI from the “chatbot phase,” and jump into the agentic era.