Cisco Systems Inc.’s Cisco Live EMEA conference last week in Amsterdam was filled with new products, many of which were highlighted in my earlier SiliconANGLE post. Although product announcements are interesting, what’s equally valuable are the underlying themes that are pervasive across the event. One of these was that the network is now critical to digital transformation.
Adoption of Microsoft Teams for collaboration exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to surge as hybrid work models have become the norm. According to Microsoft, Teams reached 270 million users in 2022, up from 145 million in 2021. More than one million organizations use Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform. Microsoft also reports that 91 of the Fortune 100 are currently using Teams.
Extreme Networks Inc. recently announced it has integrated network fabric capabilities into its ExtremeCloud SD-WAN or software-defined wide-area network, allowing customers to extend the network fabric securely across the end-to-end network, which includes the data centers, campus network and branch locations.
This week, Uniphore, a startup backed by former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco John Chambers, announced it has acquired U.K.-based voice, screen, and metadata capturing company Red Box. The acquisition enabled Uniphore to add Red Box’s capturing capabilities to its conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform.
Cloud computing has impacted almost every part of the IT stack. Applications are built with composability in mind, compute has been disaggregated to improve agility, and security has evolved into a cloud-centric, AI-driven industry.