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 | Oct 30, 2024

Gartner IT Symposium: The Place To Be for Insights

Attending a conference with the leading minds in IT offers the rare chance to leave with renewed confidence in your strategies.
Gartner IT Symposium

Attending a conference with the leading minds in IT offers the rare chance to leave with renewed confidence in your strategies. Fresh from the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, we’re gearing up for the upcoming Gartner IOCS in Las Vegas to continue these important conversations.

Insights from the Keynotes: Trends and Relevance to Forward Networks

As with every technology show we’ve attended this year, AI was front and center. On Day 2, Gene Alvarez, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, presented the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025.” Gene noted, “This year’s top strategic technology trends span AI imperatives and risks, new frontiers of computing and human-machine synergy. Tracking these trends will help IT leaders shape the future of their organizations with responsible and ethical innovation.”

His keynote categorized technology trends into investment protection, developer support, and delivering value. Forward Networks delivers in all of these areas, enriching our discussions on the show floor. The CIOs we spoke with were very concerned about delivering value and protecting their investment in existing tools as well as anything they decide to add to their tech stack.

1. Investment Protection

In January 2023, "AI" overtook “Magic Quadrant” as the top search term on Gartner.com, illustrating the surging interest in AI. But as the AI landscape expands, so do concerns over data accuracy. Even Google recently paused Gemini AI’s people-imaging feature due to flawed outputs. This raises a critical question: what happens if AI insights are based on inaccurate network data? 

This is where Forward Networks' digital twin steps in, offering comprehensive and precise network data. Our solution regularly gathers configuration and state data from all L2-L4 packet-pushing devices and cloud platforms, ensuring AI tools that rely on accurate data and recommendations are trustworthy. With 45% of Gartner respondents increasing AI investment, our role in supporting these initiatives sparked considerable interest.

Continuous threat exposure management was another keynote focus. Our discussions primarily centered on continuous CVE exposure management and zero trust exposure. Forward Networks automates these complex, resource-intensive processes, consolidating necessary insights into a single source of truth for SecOps teams.

Additionally, sustainable IT emerged as a critical theme. In this context, “sustainable” means long-term, data-driven initiatives to maximize value. Forward Networks’ digital twin empowers clients to leverage network data in innovative ways, from saving $6 million during a modernization project to enabling self-service application provisioning via Slack. By transforming the network into a searchable database, we support modernization efforts and help ensure operational continuity.

Gartner predicts that within two years, 75% of CIOs will be responsible for sustainable tech solutions, with compensation linked to these goals.

2. Supporting Developers

The Symposium highlighted trends in empowering developers and non-developers alike to build innovative solutions with minimal obstacles. Since networks are fundamental to application deployment, providing developers with visibility and automation is crucial. Forward Networks enables automated secure application provisioning, accelerating deployment timelines and enhancing service capabilities.

3. Delivering Value

Eliminating repetitive tasks is always of interest to business leaders—they don’t hire people to check boxes; they hire people who can help innovate and improve the organization and its outcomes. Eliminating repetitive tasks is the tip of the iceberg; of course people are freed to do new things and innovate, but technologies that really change the game for companies going forward fuel better business outcomes by making data understandable and actionable. That’s where Forward Enterprise shines. Our Network Query Engine is designed to empower engineers to ask questions of their network. On November 4, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. PST, Dr. Andreas Voellmy, the creator of NQE, will be discussing how NQE is used to automate design validation, inform decision-making with accurate inventory, and proactively check for misconfigurations to prevent incidents. Register for Dr. Voellmy’s talk here!
If we missed you at Gartner IT Symposium, you can request a personalized technical session, or join us at Gartner IOCS in Las Vegas.

Do you have any comments for us? Share them on social media

Dawn Slusher

Senior Manager, Content Marketing and Analyst Relations

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Industry Recognition

Awards

Winner of over 20 industry awards, Forward Enterprise is the best-in-class network modeling software that customers love.
2022 Synergy Award
2023 Mobile Breakthrough Award
2023 Cloud Computing Award
2024 Globee Awards Winner for Cybersecurity
2022 Customer Service Award
2024 Globee Award Winner - Disruptor
2023 Stratus Award
Security Today Award
The Security Awards
2023 Cyber Defense Magazine
Broadband Award
The Golden Bridge Award
2022 Cyber Security Award
GSMA 100 Award
Global Infosec Awards Winner 2023 - Cyber Defense Magazine
Target Tech Innovation Award
Info Security Gold and Silver Award
Gartner Cool Vendor Award
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