Top Trends I'm Tracking at Cloud Field Day 22
It's time for Cloud Field Day 22, the time-honored tradition of vendors pitching their vision, their differentiation, and their market traction to Field Day delegates and the online world. I'm honored to be a delegate of this foundational industry program run by the folks at Gestalt IT, and this edition offers a fantastic lineup of cloud innovators, including Catchpoint, Fortinet, HYCU, Infoblox, and Selector AI. I'll be publishing my takeaways all week, but to set the scene, I thought I'd share the top four trends that I'm tracking heading into the event.
1) AI is Transforming Cloud Requirements...and Reshaping Cloud Oversight
While this is not AI Field Day, I'm starting with this disruptive technological force from two angles. Much of 2024 was spent discussing the changing requirements of cloud to fuel both AI training and inference. This change reshapes organizations’ views on workload placement across public clouds and on-prem, driving discussions of repatriation. However, it also introduces new challenges for data center managers on just what infrastructure to utilize to deliver the capabilities required to handle these workloads.
What is often overlooked in this narrative is how AI integration into cloud management tools is reshaping what is possible for IT administrators, and this is why I'm so excited to hear from Selector AI, a leading provider of Network AIOps. Selector just closed a $33 million series B funding round, which will help them fuel their industry-first network language model into the market. What is a network language model? Imagine using an LLM interface to manage a network in plain language. Further imagine that this model provides recommendations for how to implement improvements to the network. The value proposition of this technology is clear to anyone who has managed a network or knows someone who's managed a network, and it provides a clear understanding of how LLMs will change IT operations. Watch this space for more.
But wait, there's more on the AI infusion front. Network observability provides real-time monitoring of traffic to provide oversight of operations, gain insight into pending challenges, and actively mitigate issues. Enter Catchpoint, a leader in the observability front, delivering tools for both network admins and security teams to monitor network traffic in real time with an innovative approach that provides a view across the entire internet stack and application stack, the Internet Stack Map. Catchpoint is leveraging AI technology to map real-time network behaviors to broader test behaviors to accelerate issue root cause analysis. I can't wait to hear about real world results of putting this new capability to the test in live environments.
2) Threats are Evolving in the AI Era
We have tools that put malware in the hands of anyone with an LLM prompt today, so yes, the world of IT security has shifted since the dawn of generative AI. With threats expanding and getting more sophisticated, a check-in with Fortinet is a highlight of the week. Fortinet is known for their end-to-end security, so much so that they name everything "Forti"-something. For example, see their recently announced FortiAppSec Cloud. This tool, launched late last year, offers a unified platform for web application security, and is just one example of the suite of powerful solutions from the company. One key attribute I'm keen to learn about is their cloud-to-cloud security, given the broad trend of workload repatriation and multi-cloud adoption that comprises enterprise IT today.
3) We're Still Chasing a Single Pane of Glass
A single console to rule them all is something the industry has long been promising, but management integrations mean that reality is often much less single paned than what we have collectively envisioned. The question we may want to ask is: will we reach singularity or a single pane of glass first? In reality, there's progress in the world of management integration, brought to us by Infoblox, a leading provider of Universal DDI solutions. Infoblox claims to break through the silos of CloudOps, NetOps, and SecOps with their new Universal DDI Management offering, delivering the ability to manage across multi-cloud environments with ease. In reading up about Infoblox offerings, I have to admit I'm really hoping for a demo this week of the new solution, so we can see the team put it through its paces.
4) Data Really Matters, and so Does Cloud Storage Management
Data has become newly cool in the last couple of years as organizations are finding new ways to, finally, extract economic return from the wealth of data residing inside corporations. The question is, how can IT operators more elegantly manage data and delivery of data streams to new AI infused models at scale? Enter HYCU, a leader in data management across multi-cloud and on prem resources. HYCU was recently recognized as a top leader in CRN's Cloud 100 list for their cloud native platform that delivers features such as automated backup and recovery, data migration, and data estate discovery and utilization. Stay tuned for details on HYCU's solutions and how they'll help shape 2025 data deployments.
With two full days of sessions and discussions at CFD22, I am hoping these trends will gain new insights this week, which will be shared in my TechArena blog series. Watch this space for more as the proceedings commence.
It's time for Cloud Field Day 22, the time-honored tradition of vendors pitching their vision, their differentiation, and their market traction to Field Day delegates and the online world. I'm honored to be a delegate of this foundational industry program run by the folks at Gestalt IT, and this edition offers a fantastic lineup of cloud innovators, including Catchpoint, Fortinet, HYCU, Infoblox, and Selector AI. I'll be publishing my takeaways all week, but to set the scene, I thought I'd share the top four trends that I'm tracking heading into the event.
1) AI is Transforming Cloud Requirements...and Reshaping Cloud Oversight
While this is not AI Field Day, I'm starting with this disruptive technological force from two angles. Much of 2024 was spent discussing the changing requirements of cloud to fuel both AI training and inference. This change reshapes organizations’ views on workload placement across public clouds and on-prem, driving discussions of repatriation. However, it also introduces new challenges for data center managers on just what infrastructure to utilize to deliver the capabilities required to handle these workloads.
What is often overlooked in this narrative is how AI integration into cloud management tools is reshaping what is possible for IT administrators, and this is why I'm so excited to hear from Selector AI, a leading provider of Network AIOps. Selector just closed a $33 million series B funding round, which will help them fuel their industry-first network language model into the market. What is a network language model? Imagine using an LLM interface to manage a network in plain language. Further imagine that this model provides recommendations for how to implement improvements to the network. The value proposition of this technology is clear to anyone who has managed a network or knows someone who's managed a network, and it provides a clear understanding of how LLMs will change IT operations. Watch this space for more.
But wait, there's more on the AI infusion front. Network observability provides real-time monitoring of traffic to provide oversight of operations, gain insight into pending challenges, and actively mitigate issues. Enter Catchpoint, a leader in the observability front, delivering tools for both network admins and security teams to monitor network traffic in real time with an innovative approach that provides a view across the entire internet stack and application stack, the Internet Stack Map. Catchpoint is leveraging AI technology to map real-time network behaviors to broader test behaviors to accelerate issue root cause analysis. I can't wait to hear about real world results of putting this new capability to the test in live environments.
2) Threats are Evolving in the AI Era
We have tools that put malware in the hands of anyone with an LLM prompt today, so yes, the world of IT security has shifted since the dawn of generative AI. With threats expanding and getting more sophisticated, a check-in with Fortinet is a highlight of the week. Fortinet is known for their end-to-end security, so much so that they name everything "Forti"-something. For example, see their recently announced FortiAppSec Cloud. This tool, launched late last year, offers a unified platform for web application security, and is just one example of the suite of powerful solutions from the company. One key attribute I'm keen to learn about is their cloud-to-cloud security, given the broad trend of workload repatriation and multi-cloud adoption that comprises enterprise IT today.
3) We're Still Chasing a Single Pane of Glass
A single console to rule them all is something the industry has long been promising, but management integrations mean that reality is often much less single paned than what we have collectively envisioned. The question we may want to ask is: will we reach singularity or a single pane of glass first? In reality, there's progress in the world of management integration, brought to us by Infoblox, a leading provider of Universal DDI solutions. Infoblox claims to break through the silos of CloudOps, NetOps, and SecOps with their new Universal DDI Management offering, delivering the ability to manage across multi-cloud environments with ease. In reading up about Infoblox offerings, I have to admit I'm really hoping for a demo this week of the new solution, so we can see the team put it through its paces.
4) Data Really Matters, and so Does Cloud Storage Management
Data has become newly cool in the last couple of years as organizations are finding new ways to, finally, extract economic return from the wealth of data residing inside corporations. The question is, how can IT operators more elegantly manage data and delivery of data streams to new AI infused models at scale? Enter HYCU, a leader in data management across multi-cloud and on prem resources. HYCU was recently recognized as a top leader in CRN's Cloud 100 list for their cloud native platform that delivers features such as automated backup and recovery, data migration, and data estate discovery and utilization. Stay tuned for details on HYCU's solutions and how they'll help shape 2025 data deployments.
With two full days of sessions and discussions at CFD22, I am hoping these trends will gain new insights this week, which will be shared in my TechArena blog series. Watch this space for more as the proceedings commence.
