Andre Kindness

One outcome of internal developments or acquisitions is that networking infrastructure choice has evaporated — even if vendors claim otherwise. HPE's recent acquisition of Juniper brings this into focus.

Get six key takeaways from the annual VMware Explore 2024 conference and find out what they mean for technology leaders.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise recently announced an agreement to acquire Morpheus Data, a multicloud management solution. Find out what this means for the two firms and their customers in this blog.

At its recent Cisco Live event, the tech giant made a number of new announcements, detailed plans for its $28 billion Splunk acquisition, and walked through its vision for the future. Get a detailed review in this post.

Learn two key steps your IT org should take in light of this announcement from AWS.

What are the key lessons telecommunications carriers and IT and technology leaders can learn from the recent AT&T outage? Find out in this summary of the outage and its impact on IT leaders.

What does the HPE acquisition of Juniper Networks mean for technology leaders and the market overall? Find out in this detailed analysis of the deal.

Big changes have started to ripple through Cisco as it slims down one of the industry’s largest routing, switching, and wireless product portfolios. Learn more about its updated networking strategy.

TL;DR: It gauges your vendor’s commitment. As some of you might have noticed, David Holmes and I released Forrester’s inaugural ZTE evaluation, The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Edge Solutions, Q3 2023. If you haven’t taken a look, please do. The research is the first in the industry to tackle the secure WAN space, with probably […]

Get an inside look at the industry’s first evaluation of all-in-one Zero Trust Edge (ZTE) solutions, which some vendors call secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and others call secure access service edge (SASE).

If you didn’t catch my last blog on business optimized networks … A business-optimized network (BON) embraces customer-centric principals and the five tenets of virtual network infrastructure within its design and operation. Most networks are not designed to be business differentiators but rather to enable IT connectivity. Adopting a business-optimized network gives businesses a leg […]

In late 2015, Forrester introduced a new networking concept called business-optimized network (BON), an idea that networks needed to be designed for the business you’re in. Among the Silicon Valley unicorns, this has been commonplace. For classic Fortune 500 companies, however, this is just emerging. You are probably saying, Andre, don’t be a silly rabbit […]

Some 14 Forrester analysts attended this year’s AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The conference was a mix of innovation in some areas — particularly compute and networking, along with a co-engineering approach to industry cloud — but plateaus in others, such as hybrid and edge. Efficiency and consolidation were underlying themes, from amping up AI/ML […]

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has started to ride off into the sunset (which is long overdue). For some time, you might see some vendors wandering around aimlessly, hoping to sell you a SD-WAN solution, but for the most part, the networking market is moving on. It didn’t happen like I predicted. I thought the SD-WAN acronym […]

Over the last decade and a half, networking vendors have been using various methods to bundle wired, wireless, voice over IP, and security products into a solution sale. These companies tried various combinations of routers, WAN optimization, security, Wi-Fi, switching, and voice over IP (VoIP). No single hardware product had all the services, but most […]

On March 31, Palo Alto Networks announced the intent to acquire CloudGenix, a software-defined WAN appliance vendor. This was another announcement in a long list from the security and networking industries about merging together SDWAN and security. Such combinations are inevitable because: SDWAN adoption hasn’t matched the hype. Here is a dirty little secret: SDWAN […]

The rollout of 5G is much more evolutionary than the rollout scenarios of previous cellular standards.

I just hung up the phone and can’t stop shaking my head. This was the second call this week from an organization looking for a workaround to deal with the shortcomings of a networking component. Taking inquiries and trying to help clients solve challenges is a common element of my job. This can be tough […]

I noticed an interesting phenomenon at Interop, which sparked my theory on new network technologies. New network technology maturity and its adoption correlate directly to the five stages of loss: 1) denial; 2) anger; 3) bargaining; 4) depression; and 5) acceptance. For example, Interop break-out sessions on cloud and bring your own device (BYOD) now mostly […]