Why Hardware Still Matters – CTO Advisor Virtual Seminar

Increasing since a global pandemic and online consumption of goods (retail, streaming, etc.) has driven consumer growth of cloud services, so companies have increased focus on development critical to their revenue (specifically software, application development, etc.) and “outsourced” decisions about hardware to cloud service providers. It may seem counterintuitive to observe this trend, and also claim that hardware still matters, but in reality, since 2016 the industry has leaped into a Renaissance of hardware systems innovation from AI and video transcode accelerator startups, to custom silicon development, new classes of general purpose technologies (like persistent memory, disaggregated memory, faster storage mediums), and open network solutions. There has never been a time in our industry where the hardware systems are more critical to the customer experience, security, reliability, and sustainability of our ecosystem. In this session, we will walk through key innovation domains in the industry, and how our experience building a network of 270 cities in over 100 countries interconnecting over 10,500 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises