In today’s digital world, retailers face many challenges when it comes to disconnected systems and siloed data. Perhaps more than any other industry, retailers are continually looking for the “next big thing” that can help them get a leg up on the competition. It’s widely accepted today that customer experience is the top brand differentiator, and many experiences are enabled by good quality network connectivity.
This week 8×8 Inc. held a financial and industry analyst event at the Nasdaq building in Times Square, and with a venue like that, one would expect something big. The company certainly delivered, going news-heavy today by loading up its product with several new artificial intelligence capabilities targeting customer experience improvement.
I discussed the upcoming release of Wi-Fi 7 in my latest ZKast with David Coleman, Director of Wireless at the Office of the CTO at Extreme Networks, which already has Wi-Fi 7 products in the works.
Coleman explained what’s new in the standard and how it compares to Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, 5G, and private 5G. Highlights of the ZKast interview, done in conjunction with eWEEK eSPEAKS, are below.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s just-reported financial results were certainly interesting and show continued progress, but that wasn’t the most interesting announcement HPE made Thursday.
Aruba, the networking division of HPE, announced its intent to acquire Israel-based Axis Security Ltd., which is one of many providers of secure service edge, or SSE, on the market today. Axis came to market with zero-trust network access as a service but since then has added other core components of SSE, including cloud access security broker, or CASB, and secure web gateway, or SWG. It also has digital experience management or DEM, which isn’t typically associated with security, but I believe an important part of SSE.
Mobile World Congress (MWC) kicks off this week in Barcelona. The theme of the event is telco transformation – as it has been for some time.
Clearly, the evolution of telcos is long overdue. Most communication and network service providers have networks that rely too heavily on people, spend too much on infrastructure and deliver services too slowly to compete with the cloud companies. This leads to their net promotor and customer service scores being abhorrently low. This is why this group of companies is often relegated to being the “plumbing” of company infrastructure.