Insights from the Masergy Transformation Tour

This past Wednesday, Conectrix was invited to attend Masergy’s Transformation Tour in Newport Beach at the Lido House Hotel. Masergy is one of our suppliers and the service that they have been promoting on this tour was their latest version of SD-WAN, version 3.0. In a previous blog post, we covered what SD-WAN does as well as version 3.0’s features. This post will focus on one insightful speaker who really stood out to the Conectrix team.

the future of telecommunications

Zeus Kerravala is the Founder & Principal Analyst for Masergy and he really brought the know-how for casting telecommunications for the future. Zeus was plain when he said that networking is a hard discipline which business leaders are still very unversed in. Since they are unaware, business leaders make the mistake of seeing it as unnecessary. It doesn’t matter how much money you drop on your services if your network sucks, as Zeus put it both eloquently and flatly. Companies usually fail because the network team is not ready come deployment.

sd-wan

Touching again on SD-WAN, Zeus brought up the fact that security is the top item for IT spending, even over application or performance. There are many different decisions you need to make with the extent of your security systems which can be off-putting. Thus, businesses will go with high performance over security…at first. People seem to favor high performance until they have bad PR. Security needs to be built into the architecture of the network from the start to avoid the problem of having to choose between the two.

This then is the beauty of Fortinet powered Masergy SD-WAN, and something our clients should consider is that version 3.0’s first priority is security. The example of a castle being built with flooding and fire protection from the start is applicable; you wouldn’t want to jerry-rig stilts on to an already existing building or try to reopen the walls to add fire-proof insulation?

cloud connectivity

Our blog has covered UCaaS, CCaaS and other Cloud Based Solutions that we offer our clients because getting familiar with these are vital in the coming years of IT. But as great as these SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions are, Zeus could not stress enough how our clients’ connection to the cloud is just as important. Cloud connectivity, he said, will greatly impact the user experience of the SaaS solutions available in the market today. Leveraging Fortinet Powered SD-WAN as a private WAN solution will maximize the user experience to all cloud-based applications.

ai and automation

One of Zeus’s last talking points, which was really an extended tangent, was AI and automation. Speaking on automating non-core business features, he mentioned that Cisco is trying to implement more AI and hire people who are familiar with that technology. “AI will change Cloud computing in a major way,” he mentioned at the end of his example. Shortly after that, he quipped, “Anyone seen the new Terminator? Pretty much the same as the other ones.” Laughs followed, but he then dove into why the fear of AI is misplaced and what AI really does is misunderstood.

AI is really used to augment services and make them better. They make things easier by filtering, searching, and scanning tasks that are usually done manually to complete the often boring and tedious steps. AI is the heavy lifting of data analytics and it will only do away with certain, data collecting and analyzing jobs. Think of how car driving AI systems really just make the hard things easier like cruise control and parallel parking assist; you’re getting to your destination easier, similar to how telecommunication AIs in CCaaS listen for keywords, tone of voice, and language so that the employee doesn’t have to track these manually. Zeus concluded his time in the spotlight saying that 5G and Edge computing services are what to expect from AI in the networking and telecommunication sphere.

final thoughts

While we at Conectrix love to be the information go-to when it comes to telecommunications, Masergy’s Transformation Tour reinforced our belief that this industry changes fast. We always strive to be one step ahead, because speech’s like Zeus shows us that being an expert in your field is an ongoing process.