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The Desktop Diaspora FIXED BROADBAND AFTER COVID-19

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Page 1: The Desktop Diaspora FIXED BROADBAND AFTER COVID-19 · end. Businesses will reopen and people will resume working, but many will not return to the workplace. The pandemic will have

The Desktop Diaspora

FIXED BROADBAND AFTER COVID-19

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EXECUTIVE TAKEAWAYS

20M-35MU.S. WORKERS WILL STAY HOME AFTER THE PANDEMICWork from home (WFH) is here to stay.

HIGH VALUE, HIGH MARGIN PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

WFH creates an additive market for

$22,000ANNUALLY PER EMPLOYEE

Employers save

$4,000ANNUALLY WITH WFH

Employees save up to

HIGHER RELIABILITY AND IT-GRADE TECHNICAL SUPPORT & SERVICE

Home based workers expect

Broadband providers must offer

for WFH users

MORE PERSONALIZED, PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

MOBILE 5G HAS BETTER BUSINESS MODEL

Cable has best last-mile home coverage today however5G

Fixed operators must

from households to WFH users, devices.“KNOWLEDGE PERIMETER”

EXPAND

Experts tell providers to

START SIMPLY, STUDY PANDEMIC USAGE DATA, AND REMAIN

FLEXIBLE

UNDERSTANDING IT WILL REQUIRE AI

WFH network use is less deterministic than home use

REAL-TIME DATA, PREDICTIVE SERVICE, AND AGILE AUTOMATIONare key transformation targets.

1 THE DESKTOP DIASPORA – FIXED BROADBAND AFTER COVID-19

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INTRODUCTION ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������3

THE DESKTOP DIASPORA ���������������������������������������������������������������������4

PROSUMERS – A NEW BREED OF NETWORK USERS �������������������������������������6

EXPANDING THE KNOWLEDGE PERIMETER �����������������������������������������������7

OBSTACLES AND SOLUTIONS ����������������������������������������������������������������9

THE PERSONAL GATEWAY ������������������������������������������������������������������ 10

REAL-TIME NETWORK INTELLIGENCE ���������������������������������������������������� 11

REQUIRED TRANSFORMATIONS ����������������������������������������������������������� 13

WHERE TO BEGIN ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 16

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE TAKING ����������������������������������������������������� 17

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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The social disruption caused by COVID-19 will eventually end. Businesses will reopen and people will resume working, but many will not return to the workplace. The pandemic will have catalyzed the growing Work from Home (WFH) trend and created new and enduring challenges and opportunities for providers of broadband internet service to the home. Millions of workers are being rapidly, permanently shifted from offices to homes, taking with them expectations for the same bandwidth, security, and support they were accustomed to in the workplace.

Had this happened a few years ago, monetizing WFH network users would have been the sole province of fiber and cable multi-service operators (MSOs). But now, their incumbency is threatened by the COVID-induced acceleration in the mobile 5G service build-out. While fixed broadband operators have the clear present advantage of existing connections to the home, mobile broadband providers enjoy far greater technical intimacy with mobile network users. As the 5G footprint grows this will give mobile operators a great advantage in the battle for the WFH network user.

INTRODUCTION Covid-19 Forces the Work-from-Home Issue

Permanent Work from Home

presents an unprecedented

opportunity for broadband providers

around the world and brings

new challenges to every part of

the business, from marketing to

operations to service. The winners

will be the nimble operators who are

the first to use advanced analytics to

understand what makes home-based

workers different, and to deliver the

personalized, high-value offerings

and services they need.

CHRIS GALVINFormer Chairman and CEO, MotorolaChairman, VelociData

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For MSOs, connecting network users to their work and workplace may require new subscriber equipment. It will certainly mandate more dynamic provisioning and management of equipment and bandwidth, more sophisticated network access security, new packages suited to the home-based worker, and an elevated level of service assurance and support. To meet those requirements effectively, providers will need new data and analytics technologies to enable real-time network visibility, dynamic operational automation, and sustained revenue growth.

This paper examines the WFH phenomenon and its impact on fixed broadband providers, and offers a strategic prescription for meeting the needs of home-based workers and their employers.

To meet those requirements effectively, providers will need new data and analytics technologies to enable real-time network visibility, dynamic operational automation, and sustained revenue growth.

THE DESKTOP DIASPORABefore COVID-19, most larger companies allowed WFH selectively for executives and other high-val-ue employees, more broadly for low-skill workers, like customer service agents and medical coders, and for creative individual contributors, like writers and programmers. In finance, planning and other areas with large populations of process task workers, WFH was starting prior to the outbreak. At that time, according to Rockefeller Institute of Government, “More than 8 million Americans work[ed] from home full-time, a growth of nearly 50 percent since 2005.”

$22,000ANNUALLY PER EMPLOYEE

EMPLOYERS SAVE

$2,500+ANNUALLY ON COMMUTING AND MEALS

EMPLOYEES SAVE

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Pre-pandemic, large companies were beginning to recognize WFH as a means of reducing the cost of supporting the workforce, as well as cost to the employee. Kate Lister, President of Global Workplace Analytics estimates a typical employer can save about $11,000/year for each employee working just half time from home, and those employees can save $2,500-$4,000/year on commuting, meals, and other daily unreimbursed expenses.

“Work-at-home will save U.S. employers over $30 billion a day in what would have otherwise been lost productivity during office closures due to COVID-19,” Lister estimates. In separate research, Global Workplace Analytics also estimates 75 million U.S. jobs could be performed at home and 25 million to 30 million of those jobs will be done remotely within the next two years.

[During the quarantine] work-at-home will save U.S. employers over $30 billion a day in what would have otherwise been lost productivity.KATE LISTER, PRESIDENT GLOBAL WORKPLACE ANALYTICS

Supporting those findings, a recent Gartner survey of CFOs in companies with revenue between $500 million and $50 billion shows 74% of them plan

to shift at least 5% of their workforce to WFH, and nearly one quarter of the companies “will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to permanent remote positions.” Similarly, a recent report from enterprise compensation specialist Motus estimates 30% to 40% of workers will remain at home after the quarantine ends.

The remote work story is different in the small-to-medium business (SMB) universe. Before COVID-19, WFH was neither routine nor emergent, with virtually all process workers commuting daily to a company location and working with colleagues face-to-face or side-by-side. Lacking the culture, IT resources, process digitalization, HR policies, management oversight, and other ingredients essential to enabling home-based workers, WFH was simply not an option for most SMBs. And, while large companies have been able remain functional during the outbreak with newly home-bound workers, many SMB operations have been completely halted by the closing of business locations.

To resume and continue operations when the crisis has passed, many SMBs will have no choice but to transform their businesses by increasing efficiency, both by eliminating manually intensive business processes and the expense of office-based workers. To do this, they must turn to cloud-based IT and applications, video collaboration, and home-based working; and they must do it quickly.

of which 25 million to 30 million of them will be done remotely within the next two years Global Workplace Analytics estimates.

75,000,000U.S. JOBS CAN BE PERFORMED AT HOME

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PROSUMERS A New Breed of Network Users

The large, lasting cohort of home-based enterprise and SMB workers will have networking needs not currently served by either consumer or business broadband services. A new breed of ‘prosumer’ subscribers will need a combination of the convenience, simplicity and value of consumer services and the security, reliability, and performance of business broadband services.

Prosumers in the home will require more upstream bandwidth than consumers and will be more demanding of downstream speed and reliability. They will need ways to account for work-related bandwidth usage separately from home use for employer reimbursement and productivity auditing. Enhanced network connectivity, user device registration, and other features will be required to support prosumers in a secure, reliable, accountable way. And prosumer users and their employers will demand service level guarantees like those now only offered to business broadband customers.

SMB business broadband customers will also need new services, including:

The range of new WFH opportunities for MSOs is vast, spanning hardware, services, apps, pricing, and account options. Opportunities include prosumer modems and gateways, home service-level agreements, utilization-based and surge-based pricing, and multi-party, hybrid business-home subscriptions. WFH will also dramatically increase daily network utilization in many households and bring a corresponding increase in service calls and truck rolls.

A new breed of ‘prosumer’ subscribers will need a combination of the convenience, simplicity and value of consumer services and the security, reliability, and performance of business broadband services.

Messaging CollaborationNetwork Access Security

Video Conferencing

Employee Tracking

Cloud Storage & Applications

Worker Activity Tracking

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Until now, fixed broadband providers were generally sanguine about 5G competition and unprepared to face the opportunities and challenges created by the growth of WFH. They are accustomed to slow changes, predictable requirements, and homogeneous users. They do not have the data or analytical tools and techniques required to understand and meet the needs of home-based workers, and to maintain and grow margins in doing so. To capture the opportunities and meet the challenges WFH presents, fixed broadband providers must begin by changing the way they gather and use information about the network and its users.

Before COVID-19, network data collection and analytics was challenging in scale, but simple in execution. Providers of fixed broadband service to the home developed, planned, and managed their networks according to a simple set of predictable variables: residential real estate development, population distribution, regional demographics, and competitive offerings. Service demand was driven by little more than downstream bandwidth

price/performance; all households were served by the same, simple set of services; and each household required only a single subscription.

The following chart from Statista (Figure 1) shows just how predictable the growth of fixed broadband subscriber households in the US has been for the past decade.

To capture the opportunities and meet the challenges WFH presents, fixed broadband providers must begin by changing the way they gather and use information about the network and its users.

EXPANDING THE KNOWLEDGE PERIMETER

SUBS

CRIP

TIO

NS

IN M

ILLI

ON

S

40

60

Q1 ‘10

Q3 ‘10

Q2 ‘11

Q4 ‘11

Q2 ‘12

Q4 ‘12

Q2 ‘13

Q4 ‘13

Q2 ‘14

Q4 ‘14

Q2 ‘15

Q4 ‘15

Q2 ‘16

Q4 ‘16

Q2 ‘17

Q4 ‘17

Q2 ‘18

Q4 ‘18

Q2 ‘19

Q4 ‘19

100

80

Figure 1: Fixed Broadband – A Picture of Prolonged, Steady Growth

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Not surprisingly, providers’ investment in product and infrastructure development was able to follow an equally predictable curve. Network monitoring and management was a similarly simple matter of assuring average and peak bandwidth to meet predictable household demand throughout the day, and of diagnosing and correcting largely predictable equipment problems as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

As a result, most operational analytics has focused on the network itself, using vast amounts of data generated by network equipment to guide decisions about provisioning, configuring, and servicing network and subscriber equipment. Network analysts have had extraordinarily little visibility into the personal devices and individual usage activities of people in the household because the network knowledge perimeter did not extend past the household network interface. And indeed, with household network users all doing the same, simple set of things on the network – streaming media, gaming, surfing the

web, and interacting on social media – there was little need to track or understand what individual household members were doing on the network.

However, in the U.S. alone, where about 100 million households currently connect to fixed broadband services, 25 million or more prosumers will soon be added to those households, bringing with them requirements for new, individualized services and support. To meet those needs, and to fend off 5G incursion, MSOs must expand the network knowledge perimeter to include prosumer devices, needs, and behaviors.

The cost to MSOs of not meeting those needs could be great, including subscriber attrition to competing fixed broadband providers and cellular data networks, margin loss to higher utilization of current offerings, as well as increased regulatory scrutiny and oversight driven by prosumer demand for certifiable, guaranteed minimum bandwidth.

25,000,000+PROSUMERS TO JOIN FIXED BROADBAND

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To meet the urgent and variable demands of WFH, MSOs must transition to new tools and techniques for monitoring and managing network assets, events, and utilization at a much finer level of granularity and currency. They must move from periodic data sampling to real-time network visibility, from rigid, rules-based automation to agile, robotic network automation, and from separated business and technical data silos to continuous integration of all information assets.

Fortunately, recent advances in data and analytics technologies will make it much easier for fixed broadband providers of all sizes to accomplish those objectives. New technologies make it possible to create a flexible network data fabric that connects to all network devices, collects and integrates network and business data in real time, enables AI-driven network automation, supports agile decisioning, and provides edge-to-edge visibility of network activity and state.

The following provides MSOs and other fixed broadband providers with a strategic technology prescription for solutions that will be essential to providing the scalability, efficiency, responsiveness, functionality, and security needed to support home-based workers in the desktop diaspora.

OBSTACLES AND SOLUTIONS

New technologies make it possible to create a flexible network data fabric that connects to all network devices, collects and integrates network and business data in real time, enables AI-driven network automation, supports agile decisioning, and provides edge-to-edge visibility of network activity and state.

SCALE

EFFICIENCY

SECURITY

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For fixed broadband providers, beating the competitive challenge of wireless broadband will require new residential network gateway functionality to provide each WFH user with a secure “personal area network” that links all of the user’s work devices – PCs, tablets, cell and VoIP phones, printers, scanners, etc. – to each other and to the internet, separately from other users and devices in the household. In conjunction with supporting software and services, worker-level gateways can enable the following for each WFH user account:

THE PERSONAL GATEWAYToday, residential fixed broadband network operators sell bandwidth much like public utilities sell gas, water, and electricity, delivering service to households with almost no visibility into how it is used, or by whom. In stark contrast, mobile broadband providers sell bandwidth to people for consumption using specific devices, indifferent to their physical location.

Given the needs of home-based workers, that difference means mobile broadband providers are well-positioned to capture a significant portion of the WFH market. As the pandemic eases and even ahead of the 5G build-out, personal mobile hotspots will provide an increasingly attractive alternative to fixed home broadband for connecting employees’ laptops and other devices to the workplace IT environment.

Mobile operators’ ability to monitor, support, and bill individual users for bandwidth consumption on known devices gives them several advantages over current fixed broadband offerings, including:

PERSONAL BILLINGfor WFH services, enabling easy employee expense submission

PERSONAL CONNECTION RECOGNITIONenabling enhanced security and personalization

PERSONAL DEVICE VISIBILITYenabling more efficient and effective technical support

• Detailed activity monitoring and tracking• Guaranteed minimum speed and QoS• Device-level visibility for technical support

• Dedicated business VoIP phone services• Enhanced security and malware protection

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Conventional home broadband utilization is simple and consistent, with a concentration of gaming, media streaming, VoIP calls, video chat, and web surfing during evening hours. In contrast, WFH broadband utilization is diverse and variable, spanning most of the day and comprising the same activities, minus gaming (for the most part). Importantly, WFH broadband also adds the secured use of critical enterprise business applications on private networks and in the cloud. As a result, fixed broadband operators will be held to a much higher standard of QoS and support by home-based workers than by consumer network users.

A consumer’s problem with network connectivity, performance, or reliability is usually just annoying, a personal inconvenience. For home-based workers, the same problem can disrupt their business’s workflow and impact their own productivity and even job security.

Beyond the burgeoning potential for losing WFH accounts to 5G services, more than 90% of U.S. households currently have access to at least two fixed broadband service providers. That means there’s an immediate prospect of losing an entire household’s account to a competitor if, as the result of a poor experience, the WFH breadwinner loses confidence in the current provider.

REAL-TIME NETWORK INTELLIGENCE

As a result, fixed broadband operators will be held to a much higher standard of QoS and support by home-based workers than by consumer network users.

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Exacerbating this risk is that providers’ current monitoring, analytics, and support processes are not designed, and cannot scale to meet the critical employment needs of 25+ million new WFH users.

To combat these risks, fixed broadband providers must ensure they are providing an optimized service to WFH users. But such process optimization will be impeded by three critical factors common to fixed broadband providers:

• Latency in network data collection, integration, and analysis

• Limited ability to fully visualize the network user experience

• Rigid, brittle equipment configuration and control heuristics

In addition to materially impacting user QoS and satisfaction, these impediments will also have more direct business consequences for fixed broadband providers, including:

HIRE & TRAINmany more customer service agents that will be needed

MORE TRUCK ROLLSdone last minute to resolve subscriber equipment problems

MARGIN PRESSUREdue to uncompensated IT burden transfer from employers

To mitigate the risks of WFH user attrition and other negative consequences, fixed broadband providers must embrace an operational transformation to achieve a combination of real-time network intelligence, predictive event response, and network management automation.

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Like distribution networks for water, gas, and electricity, fixed broadband networks to date have operated as highly deterministic, slow-changing systems. For experienced network operations personnel using traditional OSS-oriented tools, equipment configuration and management, as well as service delivery and consumption, are simple and highly predictable.

But the widening of peak hours, increased diversity of utilization, and stricter service demands introduced by WFH broadband consumption make the system far less deterministic, and incumbent tools far less effective.

Effectively managing and monetizing services for the home-based worker requires three key operational transformations in how network data is captured, analyzed, and acted upon, as follows.

REQUIRED TRANSFORMATIONS

1. FROM PERIODIC MONITORING TO CONTINUOUS INTELLIGENCE

In the past, to evaluate network performance and security, it was enough to periodically monitor key variables related to certain network protocols for indications of out-of-band conditions and events. But that surveillance regimen for the homogenous cohort of the consumer home user is shattered by the rise of the WFH professional home user. The concentrated evening peak of standard bandwidth consumption activities is being replaced by day-long, highly variable usage patterns. That brings with it a significant increase in the volume, variety, ranges, and relationships of relevant sensor signals showing the state of the network.

To optimize network performance, manage costs, and assure quality of service for WFH users, providers must supplant batched data sampling with continuous, real-time data collection and intelligence. Network operators must scrutinize their incumbent network monitoring solutions, and survey emerging competitors with the simple, but essential goal of identifying which solutions can provide coherent, real-time visibility for a growing array of network monitoring protocols.

A handful of vendors are offering solutions serving the need for real-time monitoring for the growing WFH user population, including legacy companies like SolarWinds and PRTG, as well innovative upstarts like AppNeta and the publisher of this paper, VelociData.

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2. FROM STATISTICS AND HEURISTICS TO MACHINE LEARNING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Historically, broadband network operators applied statistical analysis to batched sample data to evaluate network conditions, and heuristic rules of thumb for equipment configuration and event response. This was an effective approach to the highly deterministic behavior and relatively modest service needs of the fixed broadband network for consumer home users, but is insufficient for the more dynamic, and even chaotic usage patterns with more rigorous QoS demands of WFH users.

While it was previously possible for humans, using statistical models and professional judgement, to understand, manage, and optimize the network, going forward those tasks will require the addition of automated analytics enabled by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). AI/ML software can scan vast quantities of historical network and business data and build predictive models for evaluating new events and conditions to determine optimal responses.

The heightened criticality and technical diversity of network use by home-based workers will bring much greater demand for service and support than for consumer users. Dynamic, automated decisioning will be needed to reduce the time and expense of resolving service problems, assuring efficient network operation, eliminating truck rolls, shortening support calls, and reducing user attrition.

To take advantage of automated decisioning, network providers have a choice of solutions categories that differ primarily in the cost of the software, level of required skills, complexity, and time to value, as shown in Figure 2.

AI/ML software can scan vast quantities of historical network and business data and build predictive models for evaluating new events and conditions to determine optimal responses.

Cost Skills level Complexity TTV Examples

Open Source Tools

Free High Very High Long R, Python

Data Science Platform

High Medium Medium Medium SAS, Matlab

AutoML Platform

Medium Low-Med Very Low ShortDataRobot,

Squark

Figure 2: Automated Decisioning Tools for Fixed Broadband Network Providers

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3. FROM BSS/OSS DATA SILOS TO THE REAL-TIME USER EXPERIENCE CLOUD

One of the greatest impediments to effectively serving the WFH user is the traditional data demarcation between business and operations support systems. Data about accounts, provisioning, support and other business functions is typically in one data silo, while data about equipment, routing, and service resides in another.

In the consumer home broadband network, the processes, actions, and decisions that depended on some combination of business and operations data could be served by a traditional, batch-oriented data management tool chain comprising extract-transform-load (ETL), enterprise data warehouses, and query tools. This decades-old scheme was quite adequate to support statistical analytics for a deterministic system with simple users.

But, the real-time network intelligence and automated decisioning called for by the complexity and dynamism of WFH broadband management and marketing requires flexible, real-time data integration. The job demands software that can collect and integrate business and operations data on an enormous scale in real-time into a single, cloud-based repository like Teradata or Snowflake. From there, on-demand access is required for predictive decisions, critical alerts, and network state visualization. Representative solutions for real-time network and business data integration include Boomi, Domo, and, again, VelociData.

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WHERE TO BEGINMost discoveries start with observation and exploration. To discover the likely future needs of WFH network users, fixed broadband providers should begin by observing and exploring the network behavior of subscriber households while the quarantine persists and slowly eases.

Using some of the tools described above, network operators can collect real-time network traffic, performance, and utilization data, and integrate it with data from service and support systems. They can visualize the results in a graphical dashboard to enable operations experts to quickly see and understand how customer behavior is being changed by WFH, and to allow marketing, finance, and planning experts to imagine a profitable path forward.

Comparing current and pre-pandemic data in large volumes and fine detail will provide essential insights into the risks and opportunities presented by newly home-based workers and highlight the best targets for future predictive decisioning and automation using AI and ML tools and techniques.

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To capture WFH network users at attractive margins, fixed broadband providers must counter that advantage by expanding their user information perimeter from households to home-based workers. That will require new technologies for real-time data collection and integration, predictive analytics, and agile, robotic network automation.

In this paper we provided a few examples of solutions, including our own, but many others are emerging to broaden the range of powerful new tools for the real-time network decisioning required to serve the WFH market.We advise providers to start the journey simply with a proof-of-concept project for collecting, integrating, visualizing, and analyzing available data. Look for trends that reveal changing user behavior and identify the best targets for predictive analytics and other advanced technologies to capture, serve, and support the millions of home-based workers entering subscriber households. And do it quickly, before 5G becomes a fully formed competitive threat in the capture of new WFH network users.

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE TAKINGFor thousands of companies and millions of employees around the world, the coronavirus quarantine has been a forced experiment in Work from Home that has produced surprisingly positive results. Pre-pandemic concerns about lower worker productivity have been proven unfounded, with many companies reporting increased productivity from home-based workers. Even with many stay-in-place orders still in force at the time of this writing, many companies, from digital-first tech companies like Twitter to highly conservative Fortune 100 enterprises like Nationwide, are declaring plans to leave WFH in place once the crisis passes.

In the U.S. alone, over the next two years WFH will shift tens of millions of full-time, broadband-dependent workers from their offices to their homes, creating a distinct new broadband market segment with unique needs and bringing new high-margin opportunities for home internet service providers. Over this time, mobile 5G networks will gain sufficient mass to offer a viable wireless alternative for prosumer broadband users in many regions, and will have the advantage of preexisting analytical visibility all the way to end-users and their devices.

To capture WFH network users at attractive margins, fixed broadband providers must counter that advantage by expanding their user information perimeter from households to home-based workers. That will require new technologies for real-time data collection and integration, predictive analytics, and agile, robotic network automation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Barry Rudolph is the CEO of VelociData, an innovator in real-time data capture and integration. For three decades, he held senior executive roles at IBM, managing the Storage and Networking business lines. Following IBM, he served on the board of Dot Hill Systems through their acquisition by Seagate Systems and founded Corralitos Technologies. He is currently is a strategic advisor to Solix Technologies, and an independent director at Spectra Logic and FalconStor Systems.

Tim Negris is a VelociData advisor and veteran technology product and marketing strategist in Database, Networking, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence. He served as the first product manager for SQL Server, now a key Microsoft Product, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle, VP of Software Sales and Marketing at IBM, Strategic Advisor to Dell, HP, and D&B, and as a senior executive in numerous startups and public companies. He is best known as the co-originator with Larry Ellison of the Thin Client concept, a key precursor to Cloud Computing.

For more information visit velocidata.com or contact [email protected]

© 2020 VelociData All Rights Reserved.