Transforming Network Infrastructure Week in Review: IIX, Transparency Research Group, VMware

Charity, growth, and money were three themes that emerged this week on the Transforming Network Infrastructure front this week.

To the first point, we heard about how Goodwill Industries of New York and New Jersey, which operates 41 stores, has embraced virtualization in its data center. The organization has tapped VMware to help it with the effort, which is 97 percent complete.

In terms of growth, this week saw the release of a new report from Transparency Market Research that suggests cable is poised to see nice growth going forward. The market for structured cabling was $7.11 billion last year and is forecast to reach $11.45 billion by 2021, according to the report, which attributes this to growing bandwidth needs.

Optical transport is also helping network operators address rising demand, as noted in a Dec. 3 Transforming Network Infrastructure piece.

And on the new funding front, this week we learned that IIX has raised $26 million in a Series B round. The company has a new angle on data center architecture. Meanwhile, Bluecore yesterday announced it has closed $21 million in Series B funding, which Georgian Partners led and in which previous investors participated. Bluecore sells data-driven marketing automation solutions. And CRM startup Evariant this week closed a $42.3 million round.

This week also saw Cisco unveil a new release of its Application Centric Infrastructure, which now allows for microsegmentation of physical applications and multivendor virtualized applications, and offers integration of Docker containers.

“Customers tell me that only 5 to 10 percent of their networks are automated today,” said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president at Cisco. “They are eager to adopt comprehensive automation for their networks and network services through a single pane of management, while improving security for east-west traffic, multi-cloud traffic and bare metal applications in a consistent manner. Policy-based automation, consistent network security, and central compliance support are critical for IT efficiency, business agility, and competitive advantage. Several ACI customers have achieved full automation of the network and are focusing on automation across their Layer 4-7 network services, security, and application groups as the next step.”