Gartner selected us as a Cool Vendor in Enterprise Networking for 2018. This recognition reflects the innovations we've made around intent-based networking, network operations and IT automation over the last year, as well as the continued traction we are seeing with customers in the market.

Forward Networks has now delivered a new platform that focuses on the automation of network design verification, network analysis and change processes. Network verification, a new methodology to analyze network designs and configuration changes, can both provide greater confidence by reducing network risk and preventing outages, as well as accelerating once-manual design, review and testing processes that slowed network agility and resulted in lengthy change windows.

Yesterday, Brandon Heller and I recorded a podcast with Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro of Packet Pushers fame. Ethan had a great line, that Visio is the "single source of the way the network looked at some point in time". Which was humorous and insightful enough that he tweeted it out. Then all sorts of hilarity ensued.

Back in October, our co-founder Nikhil Handigol presented at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York on how Forward Enterprise helps accelerate and de-risk network operations.

Internet access in many areas across the U.S. were severely compromised and routes through several carriers reported problems. This is exactly the kind of misconfiguration error that Forward Enterprise is designed to detect and report, well before reaching this kind of performance degradation and business impact.