I went into NFD40 thinking the AI networking pitches were going to be the marketing layer dressed up in new vocabulary, and I came out convinced it’s a different design problem.
“We haven’t announced any products yet.
Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.
Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.
Alex Saroyan had about ninety seconds onstage before he made the architectural claim that the rest of the AI-networking conversation has been ducking.
Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud.
Field Day vendors pay real money to get in front of a room full of independent engineers. These engineers have zero obligation to write a post, produce content, or even discuss anything they see.
Halfway through Tom Emmons’ scale-out segment at NFD40, a fellow delegate looked at Arista’s load-balancing slide and said what most of us were thinking… this could have any vendor’s logo on it.
Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them.
Anyone who has managed carrier circuits for a living knows the pain. Quoting takes forever. Installs drag on with zero visibility.
I’ve been building networks for nearly thirty years. I understand leaf-spine fabrics, BGP design, VRF isolation, ECMP, and congestion management.
I’m Heading to Networking Field Day 40 I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a delegate for Networking Field Day 40, taking place April 8–10, 2026 in Silicon Valley.
As businesses continue to shift towards remote and distributed work environments, the need for secure and reliable network infrastructure has never been greater.
Founded by Kunihiro Ishiguro and Yoshinari Yoshikawa the founders of GNU Zebra, came together to form IP Infusion back in 1999 as a commercial-grade, hardware-independent networking software company.
At times I have trouble focusing on writing articles for some of the presentations I am exposed to at Tech Field Day. Because of that, I really wanted to try something different.
During Networking Field Day 15 our friends from the Linux Foundation, including Lisa Caywood, briefed us on a recent “acquisition” from Cisco.
Yet again I find myself honored, and questioning their selection methods, by being selected for a Networking Field Day event. Networking Field Day 15 kicks off April 6 and 7th in San Jose California.
Whenever I start talking about network visibility and aggreagation taps I can’t help but think of The Matrix.
Forward Networks has stepped out of the shadows to announce their Network Assurance platform, and I was fortunate enough to be a delegate for Networking Field Day 13 to see their first public …
This is going to be a busy week for the Tech Field Day family. They have delegates en-route to Tech Field Day 12 this morning, and Wednesday the crew for Networking Field Day 13 arrive.
This week at Interop NYC, Cisco launched it’s ISR 4000 Series. This is a new approach for them focused on delivering services to your branch offices.
I generally try to avoid oversharing when it comes to my thoughts about presentations, but I have to mention that after sitting down with Glue Networks and their “SDN” presentation, it was truly a …
Over the years IT professionals have sat through countless presentations, conference calls, and keynotes.
Our second visit on day 2 of Networking Field Day was Brocade, who incidentally supplied us with a great lunch!
The second day of Networking Field Day 2 started early at the Juniper EBC, luckily Abner Germanow was prepared with breakfast for the weary and slightly hung over delegates.
I could’ve just as easily called this article Gigamon… fixing problems you didn’t know about or Why Gigamon scares the crap out of me — but I wont, because they already did!
NEC is currently the only Vendor that is shipping an OpenFlow enabled product today. So naturally, their presentation led off with a message about what they’re bringing to the market.
During the coarse of NFD2 I found an iPhone app called Halftone, and later, one named ComicStrip that allow you to add some fun effects and speech bubbles to your photos… So, I started in on some of …
First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone from Cisco Systems for inviting us into the CCIC (Cisco Cloud Innovation Center), this was an amazing room to hold our discussions.
Well, here is the update that I promised you. I’ve spent the last few days with some of the top minds in Networking industry.
What is OpenFlow? OpenFlow is a proposed standard for exchanging flow data between controllers and networking devices.
Have you heard the news?