The Fabric 2019 Annual Summit: Reimagining Infrastructure

As every year, we are incredibly excited to host The Fabric Annual Summit and meet again with our peers, investors, advisors, our co-created companies, and technology leaders in the cloud/IoT infrastructure space.

This year’s theme was Reimagining Infrastructure for a Distributed Era. We kicked off the Summit with a CXO Council meeting in Palo Alto.

Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP, Analyst from Gartner, set the stage by presenting Gartner’s view of how the future of infrastructure is everywhere.

Gartner predicts that by 2021, 40% of large enterprises will be integrating edge computing principles into their IT projects, up from less than 3% in 2018.

Read The Fabric CXO Council takeaways.

The Fabric Annual Summit followed an intimate, invitation-only meeting with CXOs. After opening remarks from The Fabric’s hosts, Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan, we were thrilled to have Chris Bedi, CIO at ServiceNow, as a keynote speaker. Chris Bedi talked about infrastructure challenges for the enterprise world.

Watch Bedi’s talk.

The fast pace of technology, moving towards microservices and serverless, is creating challenges for organizations that are over a century old.

Karl Gouverneur, CIO at Northwestern Mutual and Girish Juneja, Chief Digital Officer at Dover Corporation, talked about how they approach transformation from their IT support teams into an innovative software organization within their companies.

Amit Zavery, Head of Platform at Google Cloud and Anuj Kapur, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco, discussed the evolution of application architecture, changes from the distributed infrastructure perspective, organizational, and operational implications.

Watch their fireside chat.

A panel on Trends in a distributed world concluded the Summit. Panelists Mallik Tatipamula, CTO at Ericsson, Silicon Valley, Kapi Attawar, Chief Revenue Officer, Blockchain at Samsung, Dr. Stuart Evans from Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley and Debo Dutta, Distinguished Engineer at Cisco focused on how connectivity, compute, control/decision theory, applications, and blockchain evolve to address the infrastructure for a distributed era.

Moderated by Prabakar Sundarrajan, Chief Strategist at The Fabric, each panelist shared insights and discussed use cases, challenges, and opportunities in a distributed world.

Watch the panel

Prabakar Sundarrajan, The Fabric Chief Strategist also elaborated in a series of five blogs the ways that infrastructure and applications are being decentralized, thereby driving needs to evolve infrastructure (compute, network, storage, security, and orchestration) to meet the resulting challenges.

Read Prabakar’s blog:

·      Distributed applications, containers, micro-services, API revolution

·      Distributed edge compute infrastructure

·      Distributed trust, enterprise blockchain, need for distributed tracking

The Summit 2019 photo album

Once again, we’d like to thank the speakers and our guests who made The Fabric Annual Summit 2019 a success. We’re looking forward to the next one!