En Route To: A New NGI Series

Adtran’s Stephan Rettenberger joined Converge Digest’s Jim Carroll for a 31-minute deep-dive into next-gen optical infrastructure while riding through San Francisco in a Waymo robotaxi.

Anubhav Arora, VP of Engineering for Security and AI at Ericsson, outlines the company's enterprise wireless solutions including their 5G SASSY technology and clientless ZTNA for secure third-party access. He describes how their solutions address cellular connectivity challenges while highlighting the increasing role of AI and autonomous systems in managing network and security operations.

Larry Lunetta, VP of Product Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, outlines the company's security-first networking strategy that integrates AI and autonomous systems to enhance network management. Drawing from a vast data lake of customer telemetry, HPE's AI solutions reduce troubleshooting time by 75% while implementing advanced security features like post-quantum cryptography and Zero Trust Network Access.

David Hughes, SVP and GM, SASE & Security at HPE, discusses the convergence of networking and security through agentic AI that can autonomously troubleshoot issues, identify root causes, and implement remediation while leveraging data lakes with anonymized telemetry from millions of devices to detect anomalous behavior and zero-day threats. He emphasizes the importance of using networks as both sensors and enforcement points for cybersecurity defense, predicting that within a couple of years customers will trust AI to make autonomous network configuration changes due to its explainable and transparent reasoning capabilities.

Galeal Zino, Founder and CEO of NetFoundry, and Roy Chua, Principal and Founder of AvidThink, explore NetFoundry's zero-trust native networking technology during a self-driving vehicle demonstration in San Francisco. The discussion highlights how NetFoundry enables secure global networks between various endpoints through software-based overlays that enforce strong authentication and authorization, serving major clients including top US banks and Fortune 500 companies.