ONUG Collaborative Project Update: NaaS
With network equipment vendors and communications service providers hyping solutions for Network-as-a-Service, 2024 is shaping up to be “The Year Of NaaS”. However, the proliferation of NaaS offerings presents enterprise networking decision-makers with a bewildering set of options for their company’s NaaS journey. Where do they start and what is their final destination?
Continuing the work begun by the Network Cloud Working Group in 2023, the ONUG Collaborative NaaS project is focused on helping large enterprises understand how and when to adopt NaaS solutions that will satisfy their business needs now and in the future. The project team has identified a small number of canonical use cases for Naas adoption, that differ by characteristics such as network topology, performance and scalability, agility and flexibility, application traffic flows, security policies and consumption models. Collectively, these represent a significant percentage of typical enterprise NaaS use cases.
Attend this session to learn how the ONUG Collaborative is helping enterprise IT professionals understand how to adopt NaaS by evaluating and prioritizing enterprise requirements for each canonical use case, and which requirements are relevant for their company’s networking needs. Project team leads will discuss 2024 project goals, including actionable outcomes and deliverables for enterprise IT professionals.
Robert (Bob) Wysocki is the Client Solutions Leader for IT Networks and Cybersecurity. His
responsibilities include driving innovation, incubating emerging technologies, and enabling
customers to deploy key digital technologies for rapid business and operational transformation.
Bob is a seasoned IT evangelist with over 30 years of industry experience, gained at Fortune 20 as
well as start-up organizations. During his 16 years at General Electric (GE), as an executive in
Corporate Shared Services IT, he drove strong business results in numerous disciplines of
procurement, product management, engineering, operations, and financial management. Bob led
the initial services definition of infrastructure for GE’s Predix Cloud platform and most recently
played a key role in executing GE’s transformation of Edge Networking to enable their cloud-first
strategy. Before GE, he also led technology and engineering leadership roles at Pilot Network
Services and AT&T, architecting solutions with the commercial value of $1 Billion. A recognized
industry leader, Bob most recently co-chaired the ONUG Hybrid Cloud Working Group for which
he received an award at ONUG Fall 2017 for leading the engagement of Cloud Services and
Container Orchestration Providers to embrace enterprise IT requirements of their services.
Bob graduated from Georgia Tech and holds a Masters in Computer Engineering from the
University of Central Florida.
Zaheer is a distinguished technology leader with over 25 years of experience in networking, security, and cloud. He currently serves as the Services Incubation Lead for SASE and SDWAN at Cisco Customer Experience, having joined the company through its acquisition of Viptela. Zaheer is a recognized expert in his field, having authored two books – “Cloud Scaled Cisco SD-WAN Solution” and “Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols” – and holding multiple patents. He is a frequent speaker at leading industry events such as ONUG and CiscoLive, where he shares his insights on the latest trends in networking and security. In addition to his professional achievements, Zaheer is also a passionate coach and mentor, helping to develop the next generation of technology leaders. When he’s not working, Zaheer enjoys playing cricket and ping pong, and spending time with his family.
Sal is a systems architect for the Merck digital manufacturing organization. He is bringing his 25 years of enterprise in network architecture, and engineering and is now delivering innovative enterprise solutions into the OT space. Over the past several decades he has driven many large-scale global projects including SSL VPN, virtualized data center fabrics, campus architecture, SDWAN, NFV, and intent-based automation. He has also been part of the ONUG Community for over seven years and is currently an active member of the Hyperautomation and Network Cloud Working Groups.
