Arista’s Evolution to Data-Driven Networking

Arista’s EOS (Extensible Operating System) has been nurtured over the past decade, taking the best principles of extensible, open and scalable networks. While SDN evangelists insisted that the right way to build networks started with the decoupling of hardware and software in the network, manipulated by a centralized, shared controller, many companies failed to provide the core customer requisite in a clean software architecture and implementation coupled with key technical differentiation. This has been the essence of Arista EOS.

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The Great (Procurement) Resignation Didn’t Have to Be This Great

If 2020 was the year of pandemic doom and gloom, then 2021 is turning out to be the year of The Great Resignation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an historic number of workers have been leaving their jobs, while an equally historic number of jobs have remained open. There are plenty of articles out there that state what is happening from a data perspective, but they fail to dig a level deeper into why this is happening. This phenomenon has been a long time coming. In fact, we should have expected it. If you’re struggling with retention in your procurement organization, it’s important to keep in mind that your employees aren’t disappearing, they’re just leaving … for something better.

Right Idea, Wrong Execution
When we recently polled CPOs about 2022 priorities for the function, the No. 1 priority was talent. This was also the No. 1 priority last year. And this is likely to be No. 1 priority every year. But leaders are often seeking to solve the wrong challenges. Organizations usually only talk about talent in one of two ways: The War for Talent (hiring) or The Skill Gap (hiring and upskilling). These scenarios focus on either finding new employees or expecting more and more from current employees without increasing their wages, benefits and overall value propositions. This is a problem.
The Skill Gap or The Skill Arms Race?
We’ve all heard the jokes about entry-level jobs requiring five years of experience, an advanced degree and a wish list of skills that no individual (much less a new graduate) could possess. This provides the foundation for what is usually called The Skill Gap — the idea that there’s a disconnect between the skills an employee or candidate possesses, and what’s required for a job. And the issue isn’t that employees lack the necessary skill make-up. It’s that job requirements have become so burdensome that no employee could reasonably fill them.

Procurement’s own version of this has been driven by the transition from a transactional function (RFPs out, contracts for goods and services in) to a strategic one (broad value proposition around diversity, sustainability, greater risk management, etc.). While the core value proposition of the function has moved beyond just transactional sourcing and cost savings, there has been an overall decline in headcount but no proportional investments in technology or capabilities to augment human productivity. They’re just expecting more from their current employees or new hires and, when they aren’t getting it, calling it a skill gap. It’s actually a skill arms race — procurement leaders keep expanding their remit and, in turn, expect it be fulfilled through greater displays of skill and capability from employees. We’re expecting more and more from less and less.

How to de-escalate the Skill Arms Race?
Our most recent procurement research focused on this perceived skill “gap” and how to address it without burning out employees. Our overall advice for procurement leaders could be summarized as:
The amount of time you spend discussing hiring strategies should be equal to the amount of time you spend discussing retention strategies.
When interviewing clients for this research, we asked a lot about hiring and retention strategies in this new, largely hybrid, environment. When it came to hiring, clients had a lot to say about how they’re re-thinking recruitment. When we asked about retention strategies, however, the conversation tended to dry up. A retention strategy shouldn’t be something that kicks in when an employee turns in a two-week notice; it should be something that starts the first day on the job.
What’s next?
In this environment, procurement leaders need to be thinking less about the skills and value they’re extracting from employees (and how they can expect more), and more about why an employee should stay with them. Some key questions to ask include:

Are we incentivizing our employees to deliver on all that we expect from them — transactionally and strategically?
Did we consider employee interests and preferences when we designed our roles and responsibilities?
Are our managers viewing their employees as people, or as component parts in a machine to churn out transactional sourcing (while layering on additional strategic work)?

If your organization is like most in this environment, the honest answers to these questions may result in some uncomfortable truths. But, as your employees have learned over the last two years, disruption is never easy. Our recent research on The Skill Gap Myth can make it less difficult.

Sam Berndt
Director, Research
Gartner Supply Chain
Sam.Berndt@gartner.com
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The Number One Thing to Assess About Your Customers

As readers of my musings (or rantings) know, I’m a big believer in working to gain a deep, deep understanding of your customers and prospects.   Enterprise Technology Adoption profiles are a rich psychographic model, but sometimes I get pushback from clients, saying it is hard to know that much about a customer.   While a sometimes wish I could turn off my video, shake my head in sadness, and then come back; there is some validity to their concerns, particularly for new prospects.

In the past, I’ve talked about assessing how strategically organizations view technology as the most important thing to discover (and one part of the developing the ETA profile.  But recently I started to dig a bit deeper in a different direction.

I was prompted by some findings from a recent study (results will start being published for clients in the near future) where the focus was on studying the dynamics of a purchase and deployment of emerging technologies.  In that study, we ask about ways to mitigate the risk of the emerging tech and those that were happiest with their purchase where the most likely to say that have a robust change management program.

With that in mind, I went back and took a look at our high quality deal study from 2019 (note:  We have a new study in the field now, I’m excited about what it might reveal).   I then looked at a couple of the ETA assessment questions that dealt with technology change.   And I realized, that willingness to change is more important than the strategic view of technology.

Photo by samer daboul from Pexels

There are two questions that get to this.  The first asks about broad technology investment strategy.  One of the options is “We rarely implement ‘new new’ technology projects"  the other is about new technology with an option of "We avoid the cost and disruption of replacing existing technology"  (for anyone who is trying to migrate customers to a new release, this would be a great thing to know).

The data is incredible.   There were only 46 respondents (out of 1500) that chose both those options.  For those 46, only 2 (4%) met our criteria for a hiqh quality deal.  There were 233 that chose either of those options.  Only 7% met the HQD criteria.  As a note, the HQD percentage for those viewing technology tactically was 15% and the overall % for all respondents was 27%.

Taking this data, with research from colleagues on the importance and value of change enablement, and I have a new number 1.

The one thing you want to know about your prospects is the organizational attitude toward change.   You can then also assess strategic value of technology.  And then discover other attributes.

But change is the key.    Perhaps it is time for the vendor community to take more ownership of change management for your customers.    That may be the missing element of a whole product strategy.

Attitudes toward change.   They key to success.  They cause of challenges and delays.  Understand it, then deal with it, for a less frustrating customer relationship.
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Why Metaversial Business Is a Very Long Way Off

[Reminder – these blogs are analyst personal opinion, not Gartner published research]

“Open up your firewalls to let your people access us!”  said Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, as I recall. He was being interviewed on stage by my colleague Steve Prentice (now retired), who asked what the hundreds of CIOs and IT leaders in the audience could do to advance corporate use of immersive virtual worlds for business.

It was April 2007, Gartner IT Symposium, and Second Life was the red hot next-big-thing. It was fast becoming a mainstream belief that VR was an imminent next step beyond the web. So much so, it was on the front cover of BusinessWeek. A Fortune magazine article told how then CEO of IBM Sam Palimsano was keen on it, and how he and his his avatar were already hanging out in virtual world meetings. It was the second time in my life I got excited about virtual worlds and the second false dawn.

Back to the perennial future. These amazingly fresh looking images are in the 1991 book “Artificial Reality II” by Myron Krueger (Addison Wesley).

 

I have always been a tech optimist. My first period of belief in business VR came in the early 1990s. I learned to use Superscape VR software and I tried out a very early HMD. In Myron Kreuger’s excellent book Artificial Reality II, I read how legendary commercial software pioneer and IBM Fellow Frederick Brookes was researching VR. He hypothesised that VR might deliver massive and complex information to the pattern recognition engine of the human brain via the visual cortex, to amplify human intelligence (IA), and that would be at least as important as AI.  But business VR didn’t happen then. It didn’t happen in 2007 and I really don’t think it will happen in 2027 either.

I have come to the conclusion that business VR is IT’s version of nuclear fusion energy. The idea is incredibly seductive, it feels like it should work, and it seems like we are always less than a decade away from achieving it. Huge amounts of R&D effort are poured into it and countless billions of investments over decades and still… and STILL…. it is just around the corner out of reach.

I’m not talking about the niche use of VR for exploring stereo isomeric molecules in pharmaceutical research labs, or occasional fancy fly throughs to wow the clients of global architecture firms. I’m talking about the everyday metaverse that becomes a common work and play space for most people and businesses. That scenario is still so far off, that I am not sure it will happen in my remaining twenty-five or so years of actuarially predicted lifespan.

Here are five reasons the tech optimism has been thrashed out of me on the idea of mass business VR, and I argue it just isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

The gaming world hasn’t bought into it. Serious gamers don’t use HMDs. One source says only 2% have an HMD. The tech may be getting better- but the people most likely to dive into the immersive metaverse first, aren’t. What chance businesspeople will start meeting here if gamers don’t?
Wall Street isn’t interested (internally). The big banks are doing huge amounts in applying AI. They are doing a lot with blockchain. But the VR immersed banker or trader just isn’t a big idea of interest. Money will always steal any edge it can get. If VR data visualization and meeting doesn’t work for the industry with the most money to invest – why would other industries take it up?
CEOs are not using it. Here’s an interesting historic fact  – six months after the iPad came out, over 40% of CEOs were using one in their job (Gartner CEO survey 2012, paywall). At launch the iPad split opinion and many commentators thought it would be a flop – who needed a massive iPhone? But it if a new tech works for CEOs they will flip to it almost overnight. Today’s Gen X and millennial business leaders will take-up any seriously valuable technology that will give them an edge in their work – from Zoom to private jets.  Many years after their launch, how many CEOs use a Vive or Oculus? (I wonder how many would even know those brand names).
The CEO of Metaverse Platforms Inc. probably doesn’t commonly use it in his business day job. OK – I don’t know that. But do you think he is wearing one of those face huggers for several hours per working day?
People hate wearing facemasks to protect themselves from a killer virus in a global pandemic and many of them just won’t do it. That’s a lightweight piece of soft cloth across the mouth and nose to prevent serious illness. What chance they will regularly wear a heavy lump of hard electronics across the eyes to make online business meetings slightly less dull?

I remain a tech optimist. I do believe that one day business will commonly be conducted in a fully immersive 3D visual metaverse. Let’s call that phase of economic advancement “metaversial business”. But it will not happen in the 2020s. It probably won’t happen in the 2030s. Filling the human field of view with a realistic immersive image space, in a way that our physiology, psychology, anthropology, and sociology can all be comfortable with, is an incredibly hard problem to solve. Yes, it is probably harder than rocket science,  and creating a commercial space industry. Perhaps Elon Musk has already come to that conclusion and we’ll have to wait for Neuralink, before dunking our full senses in the metaverse becomes a common, regular way for business people to interact.

 

 
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Don’t Miss The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2021

See what our Global Conference Chair, David Cappuccio has to say about our IOCS events this year (Figure 1).

The emergence of a new normal has changed how businesses across the globe are delivering on customer value. More than ever infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must embrace agility, and enable scalable, secure, resilient platforms and workplaces anywhere at any time if they are to empower business to meet its customers wherever they are.

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2021 is the place to find your answers with objective topic coverage and focus on top trends. Gain the clarity to create an effective pathway to the future.

At this year’s conference, learn how to:

Reimagine digital to empower the anywhere mindset
Deliver customer value for your most critical initiatives
Embrace agility to maximize efficiencies with cost optimization
Create, secure and scale platforms to deliver workloads anywhere to enable business outcomes

Join me virtually at one of the upcoming Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Solution Conferences on November 22 – 23 in EMEA and December 6 – 8 in NA. This year’s conference is focused on how to embrace change and serve evolving enterprise needs through optimizing workloads, maximizing efficiency, and building resilient systems and teams. Stay ahead of disruptive forces and future trends, and impact where the business goes next. Find out more information here. 
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Complexity is a Reality, But You Can Tame It

Even as a practitioner, supply chain complexity facts periodically shock me. This week, that complexity “Wow!” moment came upon learning that Amazon’s physical footprint roughly equals the size of where I live — Uppsala, Sweden. Uppsala has been here since the third century; Amazon grew its fulfillment and logistics square footage 50% in 2020.

Supply chains have always been complex — with thousands of suppliers, partners and products spanning a footprint with hundreds of sites and markets. Long, often fruitless, debates with commercial partners about reducing the SKU portfolio miss a bigger opportunity. Much of the complexity in a supply chain comes from decisions about its operating model — who does what as well as where and how they do it.
Supply Chains Create Their Own ‘Long Tail’ of Operating Model Complexities
External pressures for adding operating model complexity such as new business models, shifts to selling solutions, diversifying customer expectations and increasing rate of disruption show no signs of slowing. While we cannot change much of the crazy times we are operating in, we can control how we address them. Right now, we just add more.

Over the next five years:

More than 50% expect a higher quantity for most aspects of the operating model. (e.g., equipment, projects changing design, business models and partners).
More than 80% expect more software tools and projects changing supply chain design.

This growth in operating model complexity goes largely unchecked. How many projects were on your strategy last year? How many of them were about removing or stopping something? Over half of supply chains lack effectiveness in ending use of a process or technology, and one-third do not have a formal process to do so. We are adding more complexity, but we are not subtracting.
Complexity is a Double-edged Sword
Complexity matters. Complexity enables value, but challenges execution. For every benefit of complexity, there is a downside.

Operating model complexity creates coordination challenges, reducing agility and resilience, yet increases options to address disruptions. With more places for things to go wrong, complexity increases risk. Allowing all innovation ideas to flourish increases complexity and maximizes the potential value of the innovation to the business and customers. Yet, the weight of complexity makes implementing and scaling innovations difficult. The more complexity a supply chain manages, the harder it is to maintain reliability and service level, reducing customer satisfaction while increasing costs. Taming complexity requires a structured approach to separate the valuable complexity from the complexity that weighs down on results.
Tame Complexity With an Operating Model Life Cycle
In product lifecycle management, there are concrete stages with roles and responsibilities from “cradle to grave” — or in circular models, “cradle to cradle.” I have hundreds of conversations about supply chain strategy every year. We talk much more about the “cradle” than the “grave.” There is ample executive discussion of what initiatives to prioritize. Most struggle to stop an initiative once they have started it. Adoption is often slow, or stalls before completion. Few, if any, make space in the discussion to talk about what existing activities must stop to make room for all the new priorities. Taking stock of if you should or can effectively keep doing everything is — at best done — done inconsistently, infrequently and in silos.

Applying a life-cycle management approach to the supply chain operating model is an antidote to complexity. Expanding life-cycle concepts to each supply chain resource — capabilities, technology, sites, processes, policies, partners — consciously shapes operating model complexity to stop unchecked growth. Taming complexity releases trapped resources to focus on innovation implementation and adoption.

Off to the ‘RACES’
So where do you start? Because our goal is limiting unchecked complexity growth and we are the worst at stopping activities, our supply chain architecture lifecycle (SCALe) starts with what we decommission or retire — making room for what comes next. Address issues across the five phases of SCALe to get more value sooner and with less resources:

Retire — Start eliminating. Build an effective process to retire aspects of the operating model based on regular assessments to free up resources to focus on innovation.
Align — The best check on complexity is to avoid adding it. When required, prioritize complexity that improves competitive position. Building strategic planning capabilities to include customer needs analysis, segmentation, formal competitive assessments and risk discussions enables effective complexity prioritization.
Create — Some complexity is unavoidable. Building modular operating models enabling rapid reconfiguration and composability helps structure complexity, making changes to meet needs easier, faster and cheaper.
Execute — Increasing complexity provides an opportunity to embrace a new way to execute. Leverage ecosystem partners and technology in new ways with modular operating models to better add value amid uncertainty and volatility.
Sustain — Employees circumvented about 50% of the last process they completed. Problems with adherence increase pressure to add complexity and limit the value generated from complexity. Life-cycle owners use voice-of-the-user insights to regularly assess existing complexity and identify areas to reduce user effort and increase process flexibility.

Schneider Electric has experienced how a focus on operating model complexity translated to space and speed for innovation. An equal focus on what should stop, as much on what should scale, allows the organization to get value sooner.

Taking a technology life-cycle approach has allowed strong adoption across more than 100 sites in six to 12 months. In contrast, traditional approaches take three or more years to achieve significant adoption across only a few sites.
Within talent competencies, as a domain becomes less strategic, it may be removed or replaced to free up resources for emerging needs, such as the Internet of Things (IoT).

As Jin Piao, vice president, global supply chain chief of staff at Schneider Electric, put it: “As a large, high-performing supply chain, we cannot just let complexity go. Every transformation must focus on reducing complexity to focus precious employee time on the most critical sources of value.”
We explore operating model complexities in the October executive report (available to Gartner clients) and in the accompanying podcast, which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
Jennifer Loveland
Senior Director Analyst
Gartner Supply Chain
Jennifer.Loveland@gartner.com
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Arista Partnering with Google Cloud to Deliver Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Connectivity

Arista has a long history of joint development with hyper-scale cloud providers delivering innovative solutions for a broad range of customers.  Our integration with Google Cloud and Network Connectivity Center is a testament to that ongoing innovation and abstracting complex networking challenges making them simple and agile for IT clients worldwide.

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Wireless LANS in the 21st Century

The power and potential of the next generation cognitive campus are transformative as the industry undergoes a massive transition to hybrid work in the post-pandemic era. A key underpinning to successful campus networking deployments has been our very first acquisition of Mojo Networks for cognitive Wi-Fi. Arista’s entry into wireless is only in its third year, yet the advances in this space will be profound over the next decade.

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Hyperscale Cloud Providers vs. Cloud IT Services Providers: Who Must Bend the Knee?

Hyperscale cloud providers attract the most media attention and are at the epicenter of innovation in infrastructure and platform services. Growing adoption and increased spending are driving the momentum of this trend even more. According to Gartner’s 2020 Cloud End-User Buying Behavior Survey, 68% of respondents globally indicate that their organizations plan to increase spending on cloud computing in the next 12 months. The majority (76%) of respondents using public cloud indicate that their organization is using multiple public cloud providers.

Public cloud providers are generally the main focus of digitization initiatives, perhaps due to the market dominance of a small number of hyperscale providers. The messaging of these digital giants is powerful and compelling, and it would seem that the benefits of public cloud are easy to obtain.

However, almost a third (32%) of respondents to Gartner’s 2020 Cloud End-User Buying Behavior Survey reported that their organization unsuccessfully or ineffectively implemented cloud-based solutions in the past three years.

Gartner interactions show that the complexity of moving to the public cloud and the scarcity of talent and skills to build and operate public cloud infrastructure are connected to cloud project failures. In addition, survey participants say that the most frustrating aspects of working with public cloud infrastructure providers, such as hyperscale cloud providers, are:

Cloud performance (28%)
Cost control (28%)
Cloud interoperability (27%)
Migration of mission-critical applications to cloud (27%)
Regulatory compliance (26%)

Despite attention being predominantly on hyperscale cloud providers, 65% of survey respondents report their organization is working with cloud IT services providers to overcome the frustrations noted above. That makes cloud IT services providers crucial partners for the hyperscale cloud providers’ ongoing success and ability to achieve their growth ambitions and expectations.

Tech CEOs of cloud IT services providers can build a thriving business around the leading hyperscale cloud providers’ portfolios with a successful partnership strategy and technical expertise.

In our research note “Tech CEO Cloud MSPs Are Crucial Partners for Hyperscale Cloud Providers’ Growth Strategy and Success”, we help tech CEOs of cloud IT services providers to understand the importance of their role in the cloud ecosystem to better articulate their value proposition in their partnership strategies.

– – –

If you want to engage with me, feel free to schedule an inquiry call (inquiry@gartner.com), book a vendor briefing (vendor.briefings@gartner.com), follow me on Twitter (@ReneBuest) or connect with me on LinkedIn.

I am looking forward to talking to you!
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Just Say “No” to Low-Value Comms Activities

Since the spring of 2020, Communications leaders have experienced an increased need to prioritize their teams’ work. Communications teams feel overwhelmed, overworked, and completely burned out from the volume of requests that they have been fielding. When business partners insist that EVERYTHING is important, communicators can be left scratching their heads on where to truly spend their time.
Communications leaders with these challenges ultimately face two main issues: 
1. Not having a solid enough grasp of organizational priorities to start saying “no” to requests that do not align. 
When communicators say yes to every business partner request without evaluating whether the request is aligned to business priorities, they often become overwhelmed by request volume. Moreover, this might validate a perception that the Comms function isn’t strategic and doesn’t add value to the business. 

Additionally, by automatically saying yes to requests, communicators assume that business partners know what they need. They may have a solution to the challenge, but without evaluating the request, it’s harder to know whether they have the solution to the challenge. 

To evaluate requests thoroughly enough to say no to low-value requests, communicators must be intimately familiar with what the business priorities are in the first place. This is harder if communicators reactively wait for requests to come to them, rather than proactively seeking out key priorities from business partners. 

The latter is a more consultative approach to planning, and may require a shift in the way the Comms team works with the rest of the business. This will prove to be much harder without governance documents in place. 
2. Not having governance documents to codify how to work with the Communications team.
Without clear guidance for how to work with the Comms team, it’s no wonder business partners inundate communicators with low-value requests. Governance documents, like service offers and service-level agreements, can help set clear expectations for business partners and enable Communications to offer various support levels.

Additionally, many Communications teams have seen their status with business leaders elevate since last year, as organizations have faced unprecedented challenges that require a strong Communications function. Unless Comms leaders clearly define the Comms value proposition, along with their capabilities, policies and procedures, their teams run the risk of losing ground with the organization once they come out of crisis mode. 
Here are four steps to address these issues and prioritize your team’s work: 
1. Identify your organization’s most critical priorities, business objectives, and goals.  
Rather than waiting for them to come to you, schedule conversations with your business partners to surface their business priorities. This can occur annually, quarterly, and/or monthly. 

Key questions to ask include, but are not limited to: 

What are your current priorities and initiatives?
How do these priorities align with organizational strategy? 
What will help you achieve your performance goals? 
What are the target business outcomes and metrics you will use to measure success?
Why are you focusing on these areas right now?
Who needs to do what to achieve these goals?
What metrics will you use to measure stakeholder behavior?

2. Assess the value of your Communications activities. 
Next, with an understanding of what your business partners are trying to achieve, assess how aligned your activities are to those priorities. Are they routine activities or strategic? Will they help the organization achieve its goals or is it a business partner’s pet project?

After estimating your activities’ business value, you should then assess the opportunity for the Communications function to uniquely add value. Are there key stakeholder behaviors that need to occur to help the organization achieve its goals? Comms is often more strongly positioned to influence behaviors. Therefore, Comms should own activities that require behavior change, rather than encouraging the business to do those activities themselves.  

In your assessment, you can also consider the risk associated with the activity. What is the risk to the organization if you recommend the business partners do the activities themselves? What is the risk if no one does it? 

Take a look at Gartner’s tool to help with this assessment, Communications Activity Value Assessment (Gartner subscription required). Use this tool to visualize the allocation of your resources to high-/medium-/low-value activities. Then decide which activities to eliminate, standardize or invest in further to achieve your strategic goals.
3. Establish implementation support guidance for business partner requests. 
You can then use the results of your assessment to create service level tiers. These tiers clearly define the implementation support your team will provide to the business based on the type of activity. For instance, the Comms team should own and implement high-value activities, like M&A communications and strategy rollouts. You can enable self-service for business partners to do lower-value activities, like simple org change announcements or site-based communications, by providing them with tools, templates, and guidelines. 

Take a look at this case study, Principled Communications Service With Tiered Service Levels (Gartner subscription required), to learn how ING’s Communications team partnered with internal clients to implement a tiered service-level framework. This framework enabled them to shift their activity portfolio aggressively to prioritize high-value work. 
4. Educate business partners on Comms capabilities and governance.
Finally, incorporate the service level tiers (along with your team’s capabilities, value proposition, and expectations of business partners) into a service statement. Codifying the best way to work with the Comms function will help educate your business partners. You will also have something to stand on when the best decision is to say no to low-value work.  

You can see examples of how other communicators are structuring their collaboration with business partners — while simultaneously reducing their resource expenditure on low-value work — in our Service Statement Library (Gartner subscription required).
This change won’t happen overnight.
However, through consistent work with your business partners and Communications team, you can better prioritize your activities. If you’d like some additional guidance or feedback on your own service statements, Gartner is always available to help!
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