Back in person at VMware Explore: new capabilities for our global enterprise clients

The newly rebranded VMware Explore has just wrapped up in San Francisco, and the event gave us a lot to think about as we look at new offerings for our global clients. I attended the event with Claire McRobert , Coevolve's Marketing Manager, and over the course of dozens of conversations during the week we saw many examples of capabilities that could enhance the digital transformation initiatives that most of our clients and prospects are immersed in.

Building on a strong foundation

At Coevolve, we have a clear idea of our key differentiators in the market, and we focus on these when we look at building solutions for our clients. First, we always take a telco-independent approach in our SD-WAN, SASE and multi-cloud networking solutions. More provider choices and flexible access options mean we can optimize the solution far more effectively than with other delivery models. Second, our co-managed services provide clients with the benefits of self-service agility but with the guardrails and governance in place to allow this to happen safely. Third, we use our Smart Services platform to collect and process billions of performance measurements and events every month using machine learning and advanced automation to deliver unrivaled insights and analytics on our client networks. Finally, we do this on a truly global basis, supporting critical networks for our clients in 80 countries and using nearly 500 ISPs and telcos in the underlay.

Our clients depend on us for the quality and stability of their global infrastructure, but they also look to us for innovation in the services we offer. We constantly look at the emerging capabilities of our strategic vendor partners to identify relevant offerings that could form the basis of our next set of services. This event provided some great examples of these.

Developing our next set of industry-centric services

A major area of focus for Coevolve is identifying how we can add more value to our clients that operate in industries with unique requirements and challenges. In our NextGen content series we're looking at the future of managed network and security services, and how specialists like Coevolve can help with strategic initiatives like Industry 4.0 transformations.

We provide mission-critical networks today for many global manufacturing businesses. This industry vertical has seen an unprecedented level of change in recent years, with automation transforming the factory floor and an endless number of real-world IoT use cases for sensors, controllers and robots throughout the manufacturing process. Operational Technology (OT) is now driving the WAN and security requirements for many of these enterprises, due to the need to process vast amounts of data at the far edge as well as in the public cloud.

The feedback we hear from our clients is that traditional managed network services don't take this complexity into account. As we look at an enhanced set of services for this industry vertical, we need to consider technologies like private 5G, low-power radio networks and a flexible edge computing offering to support the diverse set of requirements. At this event we saw significant new detail on the capabilities that can be offered in the edge compute stack, and how this can extend the existing SD-WAN and SASE solutions we offer for our clients today.

This is an exciting area of growth, and one that could help us be an enabler for some of our clients' most strategic digital initiatives. Many of the same principles can also benefit our clients in other industries like engineering and construction, where entirely different workloads could benefit from the same underlying technologies.

Enabling a better end user experience in a cloud-centric environment

Another area that the Coevolve team spends its time focusing on is how to help enterprises build a better digital experience for their hybrid workforces. Globally distributed businesses are facing a uniquely complex challenge as they settle into what is likely a permanent hybrid model. Their users are often using residential-grade Internet connectivity, not controlled by the enterprise, accessing SaaS applications on the public cloud. There is no concept of a network perimeter in the traditional sense, but network teams are still held accountable for the user experience with little ability to control the outcome.

We see this across most industry verticals, and in countries around the world. Enterprises that have a modern network foundation with SD-WAN and components of a SASE architecture are better positioned to address this challenge, and we can build on this to offer additional intelligent services to detect and mitigate conditions that could impact the user experience.

This week we saw many examples of how technologies like Edge Network Intelligence can collect insights from all aspects of the traffic flow, from the user's device and the wireless LAN it's connected to, all the way to the Internet and the cloud application being accessed. Combined with capabilities to proactively steer traffic away from a problematic path, the data from a platform like this can help the enterprise provide results to its users that weren't possible using traditional technologies.

Adding value beyond the technology

I'm incredibly proud of our global team that works with our clients to plan, design, implement, operate and optimize the network and security solutions that their businesses depend on. Understanding the next set of capabilities our strategic vendor partners are developing is essential, but our team's focus will always be on the services and value-add that we offer on top of these technologies, aligned with our differentiators.

This is an exciting time in our industry - the pace of development in technologies like AI and ML is truly incredible, and the increasing use of GPUs and DPUs in enterprise infrastructure will quickly result in capabilities that are hard to predict. We're looking forward to adding even more value in our clients' digital environments by staying close to these technology developments, but using them to deliver powerful, relevant solutions.

As always, if you'd like to discuss any of these topics, please feel free to get in touch with me via LinkedIn, Twitter or the Coevolve website.