On Wednesday June 18th, I was in San Francisco for the GigaOm Structure conference.  Other members of the Sideband Networks team including our CEO - Zane Taylor, VP of Engineering - Roger Choplin and CMO - Sherman Tang were also in attendance.  The quality of speakers was wonderful and the way the fire side chats worked kept the discussions moving.  My favorite talk had to be Bryan Cantrill, the CTO of Joyant.

Here are my take aways from the conference:

Companies are still in the early stages of virtualized onsite/offsite (lets not use the word hybrid..) workload distribution:

While  most companies use some type of SaaS and cloud storage (box, dropbox, google), Databases, Infrastructure and Networking are still low on the adoption scale.  The latest studies show that adoption is increasing at a reasonable rate.

Networking (SDN/NFV) is becoming more visible and its importance is becoming clearer:

Manufactures and end users are starting to realize the importance of networking in Cloud/combined infrastructure. Companies like Facebook, Google and others are pushing towards network control standards.

There is a need to focus more on network automation along with system automation:

While SDN and NFV exist, they are still not as well defined and standardized as necessary.  With standardization and cross platform support tools, network devices will become easier to orchestrate and automate.  Which brings me to my last thought..

Organizations are still relying on manual network resource distribution:

Networks are still managed by hand and rely on human intuition and knowledge to avoid certain issues.  While network admins may realize that there will be more traffic in certain locations due to world events, there are limited tools to deal with these issues.  Companies plan for events like the World Cup, the Royal Marriage and distribute their hardware and bandwidth based on these events.

The last issue is one that we at Sideband Networks are helping with and we are happy to discuss how we can help.