btr

Behind the Research: The Cloud Governance Hamster Wheel

Companies think they're more mature than they are. They have governance, committees, FinOps. Dig one level deeper: no tagging strategy, no chargeback, no way to trace spend. The problem isn't tools or data—it's organizational structure with actual authority.

cisco

Cisco’s AI Strategy: Cleaning the Garage First

Cisco didn't start with an AI feature. They started by fixing a historic mess.

sovereignty

Air-Gapped by Design: Cisco's Sovereign Infrastructure Bet

Cisco just made on-premises expertise a growth market again. The Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio runs entirely air-gapped—Cisco cannot access it, even if governments demand. For specialists who maintained air-gap expertise while the industry chased cloud? Vindication.

wwt

Behind the Research: Strategic Technology Partnerships

Your "15% discount" might be burning millions. Servers sit in boxes for 90 days. Depreciation ticks. Maintenance runs. Warranty expires. That discount? Gone before the first server boots. This is what happens when procurement is transactional, not strategic.

btr

Behind the Research: Software Spend Management

80% of your budget goes to 20% of your vendors—the ones you manage obsessively. Then there's the long tail: hundreds of smaller subscriptions nobody's tracking. Sound familiar? Your procurement team isn't failing. They're drowning in the obvious while the less obvious compounds.

cisco

Why Cisco Renamed DevNet to Automation

Cisco's DevNet rebrand to 'Automation' isn't cosmetic—it's positioning automation as a core discipline equal to routing and switching. The market already decided what to call these jobs. Cisco's certification naming finally caught up.

NFD39

Why AI Networks Fail (Even With Enough Bandwidth)

Networking Field Day 39 challenged my assumptions about AI infrastructure. The real problems? Traffic imbalance, not capacity. ROCE's sensitivity to packet loss. Why validated designs matter more than specs. Here's what finally clicked for me about why AI networks fail—even with enough bandwidth.

perspectives

Career Capital, Not Stock Options

Twenty-five years after the dot-com bubble burst, Cisco's stock finally exceeded its March 2000 high. My original shares never recovered. They expired underwater. Should I have stayed longer? The question doesn't apply—I couldn't have. What I learned and who I built with mattered more than equity.

BTA Series

The Synthesis: How the Storylines Converge in Amsterdam

After months of deep dives, the picture is clear: Cisco’s architecture is real, but the hardest parts—automation, cross-domain operations, trust—are still forming. Amsterdam will determine whether this becomes the new baseline or stays a bold hypothesis.

BTA Series

Networking Cloud: When Meraki and Catalyst Finally Speak the Same Language

Every Cisco Live for five years: "This is the year Meraki and Catalyst speak the same language." Every year, reality was messier. November 2025 brought timelines. By Amsterdam, we'll know if it's real transformation or better co-existence.

BTA Series

Security Cloud Control & Identity Intelligence: When Identity Becomes the Correlation Layer

Most companies think they've solved identity security with MFA and SSO. They've only solved authentication. Real identity security happens when who you are, what you're doing, and where you're doing it from get correlated in real-time across every domain—not just at login.

BTA Series

Secure Connect & SASE Evolution: When "Meet You Where You Are" Becomes Strategy

Cisco's SASE strategy evolved from "our way or the highway" to "we'll meet you where you are"—supporting single-vendor, dual-vendor, and hybrid deployments. That shift reveals more about market reality than any product launch. Here's why pragmatic flexibility might be their smartest move.

BTA Series

The Numbers Don't Lie

Cisco's Q1 earnings reveal the gap between transformation vision and current reality: $1.3B in AI infrastructure orders validates Silicon One, but Security revenue down 2% and AgenticOps absent from discussion. We're at a checkpoint—three months before Amsterdam shows what's actually ready.

BTA Series

AgenticOps & AI Canvas: When AI Actually Understands Your Network

Generic AI knows networking theory. Domain-specific AI knows your network. Cisco's AgenticOps is built on unified telemetry—and that changes everything about how infrastructure gets managed.

BTA Series

Splunk: The $28 Billion Bet That Finally Gives Cisco a Data Operating System

Cisco spent $28 billion on Splunk—half their annual revenue—because they had best-in-class tools that couldn't talk to each other. This isn't just an acquisition. It's the data operating system that makes everything else possible: AgenticOps, unified observability, AI-driven automation.

AI

Hypershield: Cisco's Bet That Security Belongs in the Data Path, Not Bolted to the Side

Cisco Hypershield challenges a core assumption: that security happens at the perimeter. With eBPF-based agents, DPU offloading, and enforcement embedded in smart switches, it moves security into the data path itself—where AI workloads actually need it. The question is whether Cisco can execute.

BTA Series

Silicon One: Why Cisco's Ethernet Bet Might Be the Smartest Play Nobody's Talking About

Cisco's Silicon One follows a proven playbook: make Ethernet "good enough," win on operational simplicity. InfiniBand leads AI training, but if workloads fragment toward inference/edge, Cisco's positioned for the larger market. Amsterdam 2026 will show if the pattern holds.

BTA Series

Building Toward Amsterdam: Why I'm Making the Bull Case for Cisco's Transformation

I'm building the bull case for Cisco's transformation. In public. With full awareness of my bias. The market treats every announcement as discrete news—but I think there's a coherent narrative nobody's connecting. Let's test if the optimism holds up.

Chasing Consistency: Why You Can't Rehearse Collaboration Alone

There's a particular frustration that comes from knowing you're good at something—but only sometimes. This week, as I prepare for a complex video project, I'm confronting a truth that's been nagging at me for years: I can't consistently deliver

wwt

Stop Spending Millions on Museum Pieces: Why Legacy Modernization Can't Wait

Legacy systems cost millions annually just to maintain the status quo. Battle-tested modernization tools now exist to transform these applications safely and automatically, often reducing costs by 70-90% while unlocking decades of trapped innovation.

wwt

The Cloud Wild West (And How to Tame It)

Cloud bills exploding? Teams working in silos? The problem isn't the technology—it's your operating model. Learn how to shift from infrastructure owner to service broker, optimize for value over cost-cutting, and build the foundation for true cloud control.

VQ

When Cloud Security Meets Geopolitical Reality: A Framework for Digital Sovereignty

When cloud security meets geopolitical reality, even the most sophisticated systems can be undermined by legal and jurisdictional pressure points. Learn how the Trust Descent Triangle maps your real vulnerability and the Sovereignty Ascension Pyramid charts your path to digital control.

Automation Priorities 2025

Why Your Automation Fails: The Missing Foundation

Robb Boyd and Nick Thompson dig into why your automation efforts keep stalling—spoiler alert: it's not the technology, it's the foundation. Nick breaks down the hard truth that you can't automate what you don't know exists.

wwt

Why Your Million-Dollar AI Infrastructure Sits Idle 40% of the Time

Something my guest said stopped me cold: "Without automation, you are guaranteeing yourself to consume more GPU resources than you thought you were gonna consume." We've been thinking about AI infrastructure completely backwards.

wwt-2512

The 80% Rule That's Killing Your AI Dreams (And the Four-Step Recovery Plan)

More than 80% of AI projects fail before the first model runs. The reason? Organizations skip the boring stuff—data quality, security, proper cloud infrastructure—and jump straight to the transformative part. Here's the four-step recovery plan that actually works.