Originally published to Data Center POST. 

By Ilissa Miller, CEO of iMiller Public Relations, President of NEDAS

There’s no doubt that technology advancements are accelerating. With access to more affordable networking solutions, companies are embracing technology and innovations such as cloud, software-defined solutions, block chain, artificial intelligence and more to manage and optimize their businesses. With our communications infrastructure more robust than ever before, (and 5G promising even greater speeds and capabilities for our wireless devices), applications and solutions leveraging the network are being developed and introduced to the market fast and furiously.  Unfortunately, the speed of innovation will only last a few more years as the utilization of our network infrastructure will eventually be strained due to the applications in development that simply require more (bandwidth, connectivity, reach). And it’s not just the infrastructure that will be taxed but also the workforce and skillsets required to manage the infrastructure.

Think about it from this perspective: Networking, as we know it, has advanced considerably in the last 10 years. It was only 10 years prior to that that the adoption of the “internet” for business was initially introduced. For consideration, our infrastructure has been evolving over the past 25 years to what it is today. This means that the people, knowledge and know-how behind this extraordinary communications infrastructure development are, with all due respect, coming to the twilight of their careers and many have already retired (including folks that have the institutional knowledge of covering this industry, such as Carol Wilson who recently retired from Light Reading). This skillset shortage, which was addressed at our NEDAS NYC event in September 2018 by Carrie Charles, CEO of BroadStaff, will eventually affect the way companies manage their networks and the applications that run over them.

As a result of the expected changes to our industry in the coming five to 10 years, I wanted to share information about five companies that are changing the communications landscape as we enter the new year.

 

To read the full blog, please click here.