H3C and Qualcomm announced the planned availability of the WA6628 802.11ax Wireless LAN Access Point; it is slated for September 2018 shipments.  This new Access Point uses the Qualcomm IPQ8078 part number - we checked the Qualcomm website and we cannot find this part on the website.  So, we assume that this is a future product.  

While the H3C press release is not the first 802.11ax Access Point get announced (Huawei, for instance, announced its own .11ax product in early 2017), this is important because this press announcement has a specific shipment date - September 2018.

Additionally, it is generally expected that another set of announcements are imminent from vendors using Broadcom chips.  Looks like Qualcomm and H3C wanted to get ahead of those announcements.

Not quite a year ago, Cisco and Google announced a Cloud partnership. Today, at the very first keynote at Cisco Live 2018, Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud joined Chuck Robbins on stage to talk about the partnership, highlighting Kubernetes and a  unified security policy.   Both Chuck and Diane want a large ecosystem of partners and developers.  Later on, Chuck mentioned Cisco passing the 500K developer milestone for DEVNET.

Chuck touched a litter on routing, mentioning next-generation branch and highlighting intent based networking activity in the SP space.  For example, one of their SP customers updates 60,000 routers each night using automation. He then quickly got back to the Catalyst 9K switch, highlighted as the fastest ramping product ever in Cisco history.
 
Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles was highlighted as a customer of the Cat 9K. As a customer, they have over 35,000 connected devices.  They purchased over 2,000 WLAN APs and over 200 Cat 9300 switches. They are also deploying ISE and have done over 23,000 different device profiles/identifications and are track to start policy enforcement.  They are now in the process of deploying at their branch locations. They noted 550k blocked threats over the first few months of deployment.
 
My key takeaways are that there is an explosion of devices and data on the network, much of which is encrypted and a human can only do so much; thus the network must scale and automate.  Cisco is looking to use AI, automation, and its architecture to allow the customer to scale with those IoT devices and to have the network automate many tasks, especially around security. Monetization for Cisco will occur both in the hardware, but also in the solution sale.  An ideal customer would be end-to-end Cisco, but Cisco will also support open APIs in order to allow partners and customers to operate with their preferred solutions.

We attended the Ribbon Perspectives conference in Los Angeles this week.  Ribbon, the result of the merger between Sonus Networks and GENBAND, made the pitch that it is moving to the services oriented business of real-time communications over time instead of just being an infrastructure equipment company.  Ribbon has differentiated from competitors in a few different ways, including that it is the first vendor to bring GPU-based acceleration to the telecom network industry and that it is offering a white-label voice/Communications Service as a Platform (CPaaS) service.
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Kevin Riley, CTO Ribbon commented that:

• Public cloud is viable for use in telecom
• The company has deployed Microservices SBC at edge and core in a large Tier 1 North American Service Provider

Disruptive technologies that Ribbon is pursuing:

• 5G
• IoT
• Big Data/ML
• uCPE
• SD-WAN
• GPU
• CPaaS

GPU helps transcoding, complex media in SBC environments.  Have invested for the past 2 years.  3.5x transcoding compared to DSP, 9x transcoding compared to CPU, 2x power consumption reduction.

Ribbon is using GPU in both private and public cloud, just won Japanese Interconnect at hyperscaler scaler for transcoding.  Will likely pursue GPU acceleration for cryptography, video and DPI.

Additionally, the company emphasized its relationship for its new services - a win with Softbank Japan chose Ribbon Protect.

Ribbon's bets:

• Analytics & Security
• Kandy.  Consumption-based.  Only "white label go to market strategy"
• GPU/NFV.  Only company in telecom with GPU expertise

David Walsh, Founder Kandy.
Customer wins discussed during presentation:

• Optus Loop
• IBM/Softlayer got Hertz as first customer, using Kandy.  IBM will become a major voice player, using Kandy, according to Ribbon
• City of Los Angeles.  Active Shooter application
• KPN CUBES
• IPC, 2,000 users now, rolling out further
• Etisalat

The company highlighted several features about Kandy:  IoS call-kit integration, Outlook integration, web browser integration, meeting collaboration, advanced conferencing, and an AI assistant capability.  The company reiterated its focus is on the enterprise market, unlike Twilio who it says it focused mainly on the consumer market.  The company declined to disclose revenues of its Kandy business.

Well known security company, Fortinet, acquired privately-held Bradford Networks on June 4, 2018, citing the need to extend segmentation and security to the edge of enterprise networks, including Internet of Things (IoT).  Fortinet does not expect the transaction to have a material impact on the Company's 2Q or full year results, which is consistent with our estimates of revenue for Bradford.  Historically, from a market share standpoint, we have categorized Bradford in the Other category of ENAC. 

Fortinet cites the growth in IoT and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) - both of which are largely wirelessly connected devices in the enterprise setting as reasons why Fortinet felt a need to acquire Bradford.  Fortinet, like other ENAC vendors, cites the value of quarantining badly behaving devices (using words like "posture" to describe this function), wired + wireless environment support and automatic segmentation.  What will Fortinet's entry to the ENAC market mean to the networking industry.  Well, Fortinet is one of the players in WLAN, albeit a low single digits percentage revenue player.  But, like other WLAN vendors, it now has an ENAC solution. 

The main vendor ENAC vendor without a WLAN owner is recently IPO'd ForeScout - will it survive long as a standalone?  Maybe, because its market capitalization is relatively large compared to the remaining WLAN players.  Interesting, Fortinet takes the time to explain that it will continue to work closely with Bradford competitors who have competing solutions, such as Aruba ClearPass, ForeScout CounterAct and Cisco ISE through its Fabric Partner Program, citing the need for open standards.