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Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 1

Networking Field Day is one of my personal favorite events to participate in. While I’ve never had the honor of acting as a delegate, I’ve had the pleasure of presenting a handful of times in my prior endeavors. One aspect I love about NFD is cutting through the marketing hype and getting down to brass tacks. For me, this doesn’t mean getting into excruciating details, it means making complex things simple — usually in the form of a whiteboard. While the rapid fire questions from the delegates can be high-pressure, it’s also a lot of fun and usually forces me to look at things differently, and I always learn something new.

I was thrilled to put together Apstra’s participation in NFD19 last week. We had a packed schedule with six presentation segments, featuring rockstar Apstra folks including David Cheriton, Mansour Karam, Michael Wood, Rags Rachamadugu, DJ Spry, Ryan Booth, yours truly and Network to Code’s Jere Julian. We hosted the event at our sweet new office in Menlo Park. A huge thanks to all the delegates and the Tech Field Day crew for coming out and making the event possible!

Over the next few weeks we will feature blog posts from each of the NFD19 presenters that summarize what we talked about. We focused heavily on the ongoing power of Day 2 operations with Apstra AOS, and how much it has to offer beyond the initial deployment of Intent-Based Data Centers. We also delivered three Apstra Intent-Based Data Center Automation demos: highlighting our new multi-vendor EVPN support, advanced Day 2 Intent-Based Analytics (IBA), and integration with Apstra AOS and ServiceNow.

David Cheriton also joined for a little on camera chat about the future of Intent-Based Networking, and stayed on for an off-camera session to close out the day. Don’t worry, you’ll find out what he discussed without the cameras rolling soon. Be sure to check out all the presentations from Apstra at NFD19 here. Stay tuned!

 

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MINDBODY Exec: “We’re Going to See Who Wants to Run Along with Us”

During his keynote address at PF WORLD 2018, Chandre told the audience that the “true message” behind vertical software is also a critical factor determining whether the platform was successful.

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Acquisition of PF Stewardship Gives Paya Needed Capabilities for Growth

 Not quite a year after rebranding itself with a new name, Paya is coming into its own as a partner-centric company, according to Greg Cohen, Paya’s president.

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NETS and ITMX Simplify QR; Square Disappoints: News Roundup

PaymentFacilitator’s News Roundup is a curated mix of the past week’s news and articles from around the web, including company announcements, global payments news, and other coverage and analysis of topics relevant to payment facilitators.

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Evolving to an Intent-Based Data Center

Burned out by the cumbersome, manual, repetitive, tactical toil to keep your Data Center running? You’re certainly not alone. Yet the digital transformation is impacting the business landscape faster than ever, and as Darwin observed more than two centuries ago, those who survive are those “most responsive to change”. You have to be innovative, agile, strategic—and not only must you be that, you also must be more of that than your competition. But more than likely you too—as suggested by the industry average—spend approximately 83% of your network budget simply to “keep the lights on”. This business profile is not gold medal material.

No one has the budget to increase resources, so the agility equation can only adjust through more efficient and productive use of existing resources, and that in turn dictates simplification and automation: self-operation, ubiquitous monitoring and telemetry, analytics and automated, self-correcting responses to events and changes. Self-operation and self-correction presuppose knowledge of intent. That way, network events, activities and configurations can be handled in line with the business policies. If you state your intent “I must get to the office” to your self-driving car, it can self-evaluate routes, speeds, real-time traffic data, road rules, road instructions, and parking options to optimize your travel experience, significantly unburdening you from the multitude of tedious, attention-draining driving decisions.

Data center and networking technology have each undergone several waves of changes in their respective evolutions. The cost of computing in the data center has dropped (due to trends including OS independence, hardware commoditization, virtualization, open source software and cloud computing), at the same time the business value of the network has increased. Computing elements have become virtualized, decentralized, disassociated, movable, instantly re-deployable, belonging to private or public clouds, and they can only work as one if they are appropriately interconnected. All of these changes in both the data center and network architecture have made business more responsive to changes in performance, in scale, and in application availability. But it has also made system operation, management, changes, and troubleshoot much more complex.

The next significant wave towards improving the agility and dexterity of the data center, and the network that binds it together, is to raise the visibility and management of computing and networking resources to a level above the people-intensive, tactical, day-to-day operational toil towards automation based on a declaration of business intent. Intent-Based Networking integrated within an Intent-Based Data Center introduces a new operating model that delivers:

closed-loop telemetry and analytics
a “single source of truth” capturing business intent
translation of declarations of business intent into automated execution of operational metrics, configurations, policies, monitoring and self-documentation

In the webinar on Evolving to an Intent-based Data Center, Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, leads off with a discussion of data center evolution, CIO challenges, key trends impacting the data center, cloud challenges and decision points for private and public clouds. The webinar then segues into an introduction of the Intent-Based Data Center and covers benefits, attributes, use cases and guidance on what to look for in a provider. Listen to it now to align your business strategy!

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Should You Become a PF? Debaters Take on the Big Question at PF WORLD 2018

This fall’s PF WORLD 2018 event was intended to educate participants about the considerations behind becoming a payment facilitator and integrating payments into software platforms successfully. But perhaps the most anticipated question was should you become a payment facilitator at all?

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Q3 Earnings Show Continued Momentum for Major PFs: PayPal, Square, Shopify and Blackbaud

Third quarter of this year has seen a continuation in acquisitions and partnerships for some of the major PF brands, as well as strong momentum to kick off the upcoming holiday season.

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QR Codes Begin to Gain Traction in Egypt

The Central Bank of Egypt has received 13 applications for QR code licenses from telecom companies and banks, according to a report in Menabytes.

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Paytm UPI Volume up 600%; RuPay Takes the Lead: News Roundup

PaymentFacilitator’s News Roundup is a curated mix of the past week’s news and articles from around the web, including company announcements, global payments news, and other coverage and analysis of topics relevant to payment facilitators.

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Why Lenders Love Payment Facilitators

With any number of tech startups looking to secure financing, lenders have to determine which businesses are most likely to be able to repay their loans. And according to Goldman Sachs’ Taylor Mefford, the payment facilitator space is a really good place to start.

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