News in Networking: Advanced Analytics for an Oil Company & HCI for an NFL Team

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

This week Verizon invested in an Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) platinum membership. Oil company Shell talked about the success of its predictive analytics. The Chicago Bears NFL team said they’re all in on HCI, or hyperconverged infrastructure. And a Google Cast protocol bug caused temporary Wi-Fi outages.

Here are those headlines and more:

• Verizon joins ONAP (SDxCentral) Verizon is the newest platnium member of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). Srini Kalapala, Verizon’s VP of global technology and supplier strategy, told SDxCentral that “the company has been doing network virtualization for a while. Now, it will initially evaluate which parts of the ONAP open source software it can immediately use.”
• Oil company Shell is seeing big benefits from advanced analytics (ZDNet) “Shell’s upstream operations team uses predictive analytics capabilities to optimize the ordering, storage, and utilization of pieces of spare part inventory for onshore and offshore oil rigs. These include well heads and pipeline parts. The project has delivered millions of dollars in benefits and paid for itself in less than four weeks,” noted ZDNet.
• Cloudflare Access aims to replace corporate VPNs (TechCrunch) “Essentially Cloudflare is doing the important part of the VPN — inspecting certificates and traffic, establishing a chain of trust for packets — in a less clunky way and one that enables companies to let data live on cloud services instead of internal servers,” reported TechCrunch.
• Sprint, Cox go from patent suit to partnership (Light Reading) “Following negotiations over a long-running VoIP patent infringement suit, Sprint and Cox have settled their differences and announced a multi-year deal that will give Sprint access to Cox broadband infrastructure throughout the cable company’s service footprint,” according to Light Reading.
• Amazon bags Comcast as its latest marquee customer (SiliconANGLE) “Comcast isn’t exactly a new customer for Amazon, but in its announcement today the company said it chose AWS as its “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” which means it’ll be using more of its services,” reported SiliconANGLE.
• Chicago Bears win big with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (SDxCentral) It may be the NFL, but the Chicago Bears are in on HCI. According to SDxCentral, the football team’s IT team “deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software for its mission-critical applications, including Microsoft SQL Server databases, financial reporting software, and an internally-developed player scouting application.”
• A10 Networks launches full spectrum cloud scrubbing and on-premise enterprise DDoS protection solution (Press Release) Kentik partner A10 Networks announced this week that the company has added to its solutions. “A10 now provides a single advanced solution for on-premise and cloud scrubbing enterprise DDoS defenses, backed by our DDoS SIRT team,” Raj Jalan, CTO of A10, said in a press release.
• Carnegie Mellon is home to a $27.5M project to build cloud computing solutions (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has a big investment in a new program “to build a smarter solution for edge devices — like a router or larger access point to a network — to operate on the cloud,” according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The CONIX Research Center, headquartered on CMU’s Oakland campus, will host researchers from six different universities for the next five years to solve this connectivity problem.”
• Google Cast protocol bug causing temporary Wi-Fi outages on many routers (The Register) “Wi-Fi router vendors have started issuing patches to defend their products against Google Chromecast devices,” reported The Register earlier this week. “The bug is not in the routers, but in Google’s “Cast” feature, used in Chromecast, Google Home, and other devices. Cast sends multicast DNS (MDNS) packets as a keep-alive for connections to products like Google Home, and it seems someone forgot to configure the feature to go quiet when Chromecast devices are sleeping.”
• Longtime Cisco chief John Chambers launches Palo Alto-based VC firm (Business Journal) Former Cisco leader John Chambers announced this week he’s launching a new venture firm called JC2 Ventures. According to Silicon Valley Business Journal, the VC will focus on “investing in the Internet of Things, Big Data, neuro-linguistic programming, artificial intelligence, social media, security and ag-tech.”
• Podcast 372: Kentik & Network Traffic Intelligence (Packet Pushers) Last but certainly not least, Kentik’s Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman took the airwaves last week for a Packet Pushers podcast on Kentik and our network traffic intelligence platform. Give it a listen to hear Avi’s take on the challenges of getting visibility in the cloud and on provider networks and what we’re doing to help.

Until next week, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to see more of these headlines in real time.