2019

Yep, I know.  Already a month in and only now am I blogging about what this year is going to bring!  Well, there's a reason for that.  I spent a good couple of weeks over the Christmas period contemplating my navel - complete down time from the tech and away from the devil they call work!  (As did many of my friends and contemporaries this year interestingly)  And what big conclusions did I draw?  What grand resolutions did I make?

Well, none to be honest.  But I did resolve to spend more time putting myself out there in the community, trying to help the less experienced along and pass on the benefit of my painfully-learned wisdom (if only I had some!)  I started a really fun project with my good friend Malcolm Booden before Christmas, the Network Freestylers - where we are making videos where we describe topics and technologies using the medium of whiteboarding!  Using our experience and practical skills we use every day in a work context to give a little back hopefully ...  2019 is going to see loads more videos produced, and improvements in the production too!

2019 got off to a flying start - work is super-busy as we enter our last quarter of the Financial Year.  The blog didn't win any prizes in the IT Blog Awards, but congrats to those that did!  TBH it was just nice to be thought of in the same breath as those guys!  Maybe this year!  To top that, I've already had a fantastic opportunity in January to travel to Barcelona to Cisco Live Europe with the awesome Cisco Champions programme to record a boat load of podcasts, meeting and interviewing some amazing people!  That was huge fun, and I cannot wait to hear the results at cisco.com/go/ccr ...

And so now we plough on with great stories for our customers of end-to-end software defined networks, with application and access policy defined in a central place and distributed through the access network, through the WAN and into the DC and Cloud.  That's very much the message for this year, with the possibility of creating such networks a real possibility, maybe for the first time.  My feeling is that the differentiators are going to be the ones who can take those capabilities and build aggregation and orchestration tools that can give you a different level of visibility and service from your networks.

Maybe the hype about all networkers being developers is finally coming true?  Well, maybe not.  But I do think it's time to consider not what the network is configured to do and forcing people down a path because of that, but what the business operating model needs to be and to build tooling that through APIs and orchestration that can address those requirements from user to application, wherever they are.

So 2019?  More of the same, with some added video and podcast fun thrown in please!