Gartner IOCS 2022 Recap – Leading the Next Phase of Growth

By Klaus Schwegler | December 14, 2022

After a 3-year hiatus of hosting an in-person event, the annual Gartner IOCS (short for Gartner Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference) returned to Las Vegas last week. As we all know, much has changed since 2019, so there was a good buzz of excitement in the cooled air at the Venetian exhibition center. Over three days, a packed agenda started with the Day 1 keynote, “I&O Forward – Leading the Next Phase of Growth.”

As one would expect after such a long break, the keynote started with a look back at 2019. Say what you want about analysts’ forecasts and predictions, but Gartner clearly got it right back then when they highlighted in 2019 that organizations need to embrace disruption. Certainly, organizations had no choice but to deal with a massively disruptive force.

Now, as 2022 ends, the event focused on the fact that “Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders have a critical role to play in transforming and enhancing their capabilities to empower the anywhere business.”

This aligns very well with our focus and mission to help CIOs, CISOs, and IT teams modernize their infrastructure and simplify operations by converging networking and security in an all-in-one service with an absurdly great customer experience. It’s a safe bet to forecast that an “anywhere business” will be the way organizations are going to do business for the foreseeable future. Aryaka’s approach to delivering converged Network and Security-as-a-Service is well suited to be that transformative partner for organizations. No wonder we had steady traffic to our booth, and Dave Ginsburg’s, Aryaka VP of Marketing, theater presentation ‘How to bring SASE to Life with a Zero Trust WAN’ attracted a large crowd and interest. See his presentation slides at the bottom of this blog.

Three Predictions and Trends for AI-Networking, SD-WAN and SASE

Given Aryaka’s position and focus, I am going to focus on three notable predictions and what Gartner calls SPAs (Strategic Planning Assumptions) for Networking, SD-WAN, and SASE:

In the talk ‘Innovations Driving the Future of Networks’, Gartner highlighted these 5 key innovations as shown on the right. Aryaka has already innovated in these areas or has a clear roadmap and investment strategy to deliver in the next couple of years as markets and organizations mature and adopt these solutions.
In the session ‘AI Networking: Myth vs. Reality and What Does It Mean for Me?’ Gartner’s SPA states that “by 2025, 40% of Enterprises With SD-WAN Deployments Will Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) Functions to Automate Day 2 Operations, Compared With Fewer Than 10% in 2022.” Aryaka uses a set of integrated tools leveraging our substantial Data Lake with Machine Learning (ML) and AI to deliver an optimized SD-WAN deployment and better user experience. Our sophisticated, native provisioning and monitoring solutions like EagleEye, ANIT, and MyAryaka provide millions of data points for AI-based proactive and predictive insights, for example, for problem management for a shorter mean time to resolution.
Lastly, in ‘How to Align SD-WAN Projects With SASE Initiatives’ Gartner’s SPA shows that “by 2025, at least 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption encompassing user, branch and edge access, up from 10% in 2020.” We hear daily from our customers that converging network and security, delivered as a service, will reduce complexity and address the skills gap organizations are confronted with, especially in cybersecurity roles. Also, here we move IT forward and help enterprises lead the next phase of growth.

Looking ahead to 2023

As Gartner noted in their keynote, this is the first time in a very long time that businesses have faced the triple threat of inflation, skills shortage, and supply chain constraints.

With still much economic uncertainty ahead going into 2023, Aryaka’s co-managed SD-WAN and Unified SASE solution, delivered as a service and available exclusively as a OPEX-only subscription consumption model, can help alleviate several of these challenges. We will be at several physical and virtual events in 2023, see you there. Or contact us for a live demo and to discuss how we can help you to look forward to 2023 for your next phase of growth.

(slideshare Dave’s Gartner Presentation)