Phil Griston

April is the most active time of the year for tornadoes in the U.S. with multiple severe storms recently hitting the Gulf Coast and South. In case disaster strikes, is your business ready? My colleague and Windstream CTO Art Nichols shares how businesses can preserve connectivity, security and collaboration when Mother Nature takes its course: https://bit.ly/3sqDgQE #extremeweather #businesscontinuity

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Lumen: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Lumen is enjoying a Renaissance under new CEO, Kate Johnson. She recognized the hard truth that Lumen had too much debt and managed to sell the South American and European assets above fair value to Colt and one other player. Less widely known is that Lumen sold off its ILEC business to Brightspeed for $7.5 billion. In addition, she is focusing on fibre-to-the-home deployment as opposed to trying to protect legacy twisted copper wire assets. Many telecom CEOs are unable to make the hard choice of cannibalizing or selling slow growth PSTN services like POTs and DSL in order to deploy new, technologically more advanced services. But the stock market approves the strategy as far sighted. Furthermore, Johnson has recognized that Lumen should finally integrate its five networks into one. These five networks reflect purchases of distressed assets that previous CEOs made over 15 years ago, including Qwest Communications, Time Warner Telecom, Global Crossing, and others. Integration is estimated to slash network expenses by a billion USD a year. If Lumen has integrated these assets in a timely fashion, Lumen's shareholders would be about $15 billion dollars richer today. It would still have its international assets and be a global player. Kate Johnson is making Lumen's focus the AI industry. This is good marketing and investors are likely to buy it short term. Nonetheless, AI has all the marking of a gigantic bubble as the revenue potential of generative AI is limited and certainly not great enough to justify the massive investments in the sector. Large language models are simply gigantic nonlinear statistical models that ape whatever language samples are used to estimate them. Reasoning ability is extremely limited. If a model was estimated using Donald Trump's tweets, it would insist that the 2020 election was stolen and that he is the most oppressed man on the planet. This so-called AI is basically regurgitation. It will be sensible if trained on the Wall Street and New York Times or downright crazy if trained on the proceedings of the Flat Earth Society. It is likely Lumen will benefit from being a partner of the Digital Titans, but I suspect the growth benefit will peter out in a few years when AI undergoes its own crisis just like the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000. I would focus more on reducing head count as transport and transit services can be profitable, but only if the company is lean and mean. I wish Lumen the best of luck. #lumen #renaissance #integration #leverage #katejohnson #ai

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"The age-old wisdom of a Native American proverb, “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep”, resonates strongly with the current malaise pervading the telecoms industry. It is a fitting metaphor for the industry’s collective denial of its own flawed 5G gambits, which is costing it dearly in capital and, more deeply, compromising its long-term viability." Credit: Luke Kehoe, "5G: telcoms’ denial of its flaws and failures is costing them dearly" Short term the industry needs to get back to basics - customers, efficiency, 101 running a good business Long term... #6G cannot be the next #5G https://lnkd.in/eQDy-vj6

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NetApp delivered an enviable beat/beat quarter with strong guidance. My comments on the Qtr included in SiliconAngle's coverage, but here's my quick take: ▶︎ Killing it in All-Flash, ARR ↑19% y/y ▶︎ AFA should only grow w/ new A- & C-Series, announced last week ▶︎ Strongest cloud story of any storage company: ↑43% hybrid, ↑9% public ▶︎ Public Cloud Gross Margin grew to 74% from 66% year ago. ▶︎ Very strong Keystone as-a-service ↑55% y/y. ▶︎ Record Operating Margin 29% What we're watching: ▶︎ Enterprise AI tailwinds slow to arrive: will new AI strategy pay off? ▶︎ Public Cloud Gross Margin target 75-80% - on the way, not quite there. Overall revenue growth 6% y/y - solid relative to past quarters industry-wide but need to see competitive earnings over next few weeks to compare relative to industry. Stellar quarter. Congratulations to George Kurian & the team! https://lnkd.in/eHtQ_bC9

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NETSCOUT is unleashing data driven insights for #AI with its Omnis platform. I had the privledge to speak with Bruce Kelley and his team on how NETSCOUT is bringing value to their telco customers. Message me for a copy of the report. The emergence of 5G Stand Alone and cloud-native technologies has transformed network service delivery, providing greater flexibility and scalability. However, this shift has also introduced increased complexity, driven by disaggregated network functions, enhanced encryption layers, new packet message formats, and growing volumes of subscriber data traffic. As a result, communication service providers (CSPs) are seeking higher-quality operational data to better optimize network and service availability, performance, and profitability. The new NETSCOUT Omnis™ CSP AI Insight platform integrates an Omnis CSP AI Sensor and AI Omnis CSP Streamer aimed at supporting both AIOps and SecOps teams. The solution extracts data at or near the source and generates enriched metadata for advanced use cases. These include: gaining insights into customer behavior and preferences, monitoring spectrum depletion through heavy users in fixed wireless access (FWA), providing assurance for 5G SA service slicing, enhancing security with improved threat detection, boosting net promoter scores (NPS), and enabling various monetization use cases, such as traffic planning, security, and prediction. The platform also supports enhanced service offerings through network exposure APIs and helps identify fresh marketing opportunities, among other applications. https://lnkd.in/eTkWU2Ve

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Super C is at the forefront of innovation in high-capacity optical transmission. Find out what you need to know about this key technology that will help network operators manage ever-increasing bandwidth demand from Christian Uremovic on the Infinera blog: #SuperC #Cband #OpticalNetworking

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#Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen is LIVE with Ben Book, GigaOm! Tune in now or listen later to their discussion on #datamanagement, #AI, and security and how Cohesity plays a pivotal role in the space.

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Boost Mobile and Wind River collaborate on the largest CaaS vendor changeover on an Open RAN network! Another great win for #WindRiver, and a moment of reflection. My takes from this success are three. Never give up. My colleagues had a dream (sound familiar?) and pursued it despite headwinds/adversities and delays. Perseverance and constancy gave them (and the client) the sense of being the right choice. Reputation is like a bee; it can fly but can sting you. An incumbent position is not a fixed status, it is not granted, and you need to maintain it and gain it every time. Challenge yourself. You can be Goliath tomorrow so, don’t forget you were David. Focus on what’s next, your client, be grounded, and don’t let the other determine who you are. Well done team! #WeAreWindRiver #StarlingX #CoreToEdge 🔗Learn more: https://ow.ly/iVMl30sIwTn

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With the immense volume of AI training data that is distributed across locations for processing, it’s no surprise that we are preparing for a boom in submarine capacity growth. Geoff Bennett looks at the impact of AI on submarine networks on the Infinera blog: #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #SubmarineNetworks #SubseaNetworks #OpticalNetworking

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IEEE Computer Society is home to over 200 active IEEE Standards Association | IEEE SA standards and over 200 active projects from our 17 Standards Committees. We recognize that #standards fuel the development and implementation of technologies that influence and transform the way we live, work, and communicate, and we strongly support the development of high-quality and market relevant standards within the field of interest of the Computer Society to reflect the continuous creation of new practices and technologies. You can be a part of our team in the standards board activities.  Being a part of this community is an opportunity to share your insight with like-minded individuals from across the world!   You can visit computer.org to find ongoing calls for participation for various standards. #ieee #ieeesa #standards #computer #computerscience

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A quite comprehensive review of what is happening with open RAN and who is winning out of it - if anyone. Certainly worth reading, certainly worth reflecting...😉 https://lnkd.in/dicfS3G3

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With the immense volume of AI training data that is distributed across locations for processing, it’s no surprise that we are preparing for a boom in submarine capacity growth. Geoff Bennett looks at the impact of AI on submarine networks on the Infinera blog: #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #SubmarineNetworks #SubseaNetworks #OpticalNetworking

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🧐 Here’s a tip about compute power at the edge vs. in a cloud: Combine the best of both to move your business forward. #EdgeComputing ⚡: Lightning-fast, ultra low-latency processing almost anywhere you need it; for example, to enable autonomous robots or optimize an AR/VR experience. 🤖 #CloudComputing ☁️: Unlimited power, accessible anywhere—say, to scale an e-commerce platform or share collaboration tools with remote partners. The real game-changer is using both edge and cloud computing for unbeatable performance!🎉 Let’s connect to start a conversation on your organizations 2025 needs. 📧[email protected] Click on the link to learn more ➡️ https://lnkd.in/g_JAb4Rs

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Check out the latest conversation between TechForge Media and Rick Mur, covering: ✅ global #WAN trends ✅ latest business challenges when dealing with #connectivity ✅ what businesses can do to navigate those challenges, with real-case examples These points will also be part of Rick's presentation during the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series in California on June 5th, in Santa Clara Convention Center. We hope to see you there!

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We just launched Edge Compute Stack 3.5 -- it's got a lot of bells and whistles -- I like how Network World breaks down the state of the edge computing market, what companies need in terms of edge infrastructure, and how ECS 3.5 helps them get there in this article. https://bit.ly/3VKJFBf

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In my latest blog, I review the book Ecosystem-Led Growth by Bob Moore. Since moving into the Field CTO role at Kentik I have been fortunate to work on building out our ecosystem of partners. I am a firm believer this is the way of the future for B2B SaaS sales. If you are in GTM in a B2B SaaS company and have not heard of this concept, I highly recommend you check out Bob's book. Thanks Erik Rudin for the recommendation!

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Service reliability requires building better broadband access and middle-mile networks, and service affordability – more than availability – is needed to deliver digital equality. Kurt Raaflaub explains why and looks at two more digital equality tenets on the Infinera blog: #DigitalEquality #RuralBroadband #MiddleMile

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Zapata Generative AI resolves the most complex problems of multiple Industries. Podcast https://lnkd.in/gHjeeq8R Starting in 2017, before there was really any discussion about AI, Zapata was already working on their Generative IA solutions for industry. In his conversation with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, Christopher Savoie, Ph.D., JD, CEO and Co-Founder of Zapata.AI discusses several of the industries that they support including: ·      Solutions by Industry ·      Financial Services ·      Government, Defense & Intelligence ·      Manufacturing ·      Telecom, Media & Technology ·      Transport & Logistics Christopher starts off by discussing a real-time IndyCar racing solution they are working on for Andretti Global. Because of the racing aspect of the project, it creates issues that are not normally encountered in most industrial solutions. However, they were able to start with 20 years of historical data which was invaluable to the project. The predictive aspect for racing is very interesting. The same predictive analysis for racing can be proactively applied to every hop and more of a telco architecture allowing them to operate more efficiently with more reliability. Lastly, Christopher discusses the military supply chain aspect of their solution allows them to identify where problems will happen, what they will affect, and what will need to be done to correct the issue. Listen in to learn how Generative AI can be applied to your problems and help create solutions for your company. About: They are Zapata.AI, a global team of scientists and engineers dedicated to solving the most computationally complex problems in industry. They make Industrial Generative AI, a category of enterprise software that harnesses language and numerical models for domain-specific, industrial-scale applications. Faster and richer simulations, more efficient optimization solutions, inferred data for unmeasurable variables, custom high-performance LLM capabilities A powerful suite of Generative AI solutions for enriching analytics and customizing large language models tailored to your business. For more information, go to: Zapata.AI

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