In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.

During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including:

• Current state of enterprise networking
• Is there useful innovation in networking, or is it just vendor hype?
• Are enterprises moving into the cloud, and how organized are those moves?
• How do you bring your data closer to compute resources when you move to the cloud?
• Are new data centers built on-premises or in colocation facilities?
• Why is automation so hard to implement in enterprise environment?
• Does GIFEE (Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else) make sense and how can we implement the parts that make sense in enterprise networks?
• How do you start simplifying the infrastructure and how do you get rid of legacy stuff?
• How do we move from premium products to premium people?
• Why are we still ignoring simple best practices like configuration templates and doing controlled rollbacks after a failed change?