Top Takeaways from the 2021 Iron Bow Engineering Summit

Iron Bow’s annual Engineering Summit is one of the biggest events of the year. Being held virtually for the second year in a row did little to impede the productivity, information sharing and team building. Over three days, Iron Bow’s industry-leading, thought leadership-packed team of engineers gathered to share best practices, trends on key capabilities and technology focus areas for the future. Topics spanned the gamut from: programmability, customer experience, networking, data center solutions, zero trust, artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital health.  In addition to in-house expertise, no engineering summit would be complete without participation from Iron Bow’s strategic partner community. Cisco, Dell Technologies and Intel shined among the bigger sponsors with other industry leaders such as Hewlett-Packard Incorporated (HPI), Zscaler, Aruba, SYNNEX, NetApp and Forcepoint also participating. Here are some of the top takeaways from the 2021 Iron Bow Engineering Summit.

The only constant is change

Technology itself has always moved faster than most other industries, especially the last few decades. While 2021 will continue to see change, there are some specific areas that are going to see the most growth. Software, cloud, everything as a service, automation, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and customization will all see enormous change in the near future. With software like Intel’s processors and internal computing powers only getting more robust and faster, 72% of companies interested in moving to the cloud, and AI/ML becoming more common place (which in turn leads to more automation), organizations are looking to customize all these capabilities and tailor them to meet their specific business goals. Iron Bow is prepared to be at the forefront of these technology changes and meet them where rubber hits the road to serve its customers and enable efficiencies and productivity to every applicable process.

Continue to expand

The old adage “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” comes to mind but while that remains true, it’s not entirely representative of Iron Bow’s current goings-on. They’ll continue to bring the top tier service and industry knowledge the company is known for, but will allow their footprint to continue to grow in these areas, as well.

• Unified Communications Management (UCM) – provides cloud-based unified communication and collaboration applications within a virtualized platform under a centralized management system. This tool is flexible, scalable and reduces complexity for IT teams. Iron Bow will continue to invest and expand its capabilities and reach in UCM for government, commercial and DoD verticals.
• As a Service – device as a service (DaaS), infrastructure as a service and IronCare™ (Iron Bow’s managed service offering) are expected to continue to expand and grow as 2021 unfolds. DaaS streamlines device lifecycle management while optimizing device-related costs and reducing enterprise risk. Infrastructure as a service allows organizations to consume on-premises infrastructure in a pay-as-you-grow model. IronCare includes things like enterprise technical support, remote monitoring, management and maintenance of technology solutions and systems.
• Software Enablement and Expansion (CX) – Iron Bow doesn’t just want to expand their reach for themselves but for customers, too. So for 2021, Iron Bow plans to help customers realize greater software enablement through our XR program – a customer experience that has been redefined to make the most of each customer’s solutions that are tailored to their organization. It’s outcome-based technology implementation. Read more on that here.
• Software defined networking (SDN) and WiFi 6 – SDN is only getting bigger and more robust. Through cloud deployments, cloud FedRAMP deployments (for government and DoD), and premise-based deployments, the market is becoming more familiar with these capabilities through companies like Amazon Web Services (aws) and software as a service models. WiFi-6 is certainly to be a game changer with its higher data rates, reduced latency and increased overall network capacity. Users will see these changes with more data being transferred in a faster way.

Future focus

Besides the current work being done at Iron Bow, focusing on the future and not just anticipating it but having a role in shaping it is important to success.  Here is a small slice of future focus areas Iron Bow has in its sights.

• Zero trust architecture – this a concept that is built upon a whole host of different security products that together create a comprehensive zero trust architecture. Iron Bow helps customers lock down their networks at every entry point to ensure network protection. With malware incidences increasing by 300%, 54% of apps having vulnerabilities and some malicious actors having access to networks for up to nine months before being detected, organizations absolutely have to take a zero trust approach to security in order to stay viable and protected.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) – RPA allows computers to handle high volume, rote processes and frees up employee resources to focus on more complex problems and solving customer issues. AI can be applied to organizations when it comes to security. If an organization doesn’t have artificial intelligence built into its security, they will miss insights into things like correlation of events (like after a breach, for instance) and identifying areas of improvement.

Spearheading AI with Iron Bow, Intel brings their decades of industry-leading software and capabilities to bear through products like IronTarget™ and builds AI applications on the foundation of Xeon Scalable processors. From edge to cloud, Intel provides the flexibility, scalability and the quickness organizations need to get the most out of their products by baking AI into every app. Intel’s AI capabilities are offered through a wide variety of industries like healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing and government so the most amount of customers can utilize the speed and insights Intel AI provides.

With the foundational goals Iron Bow has laid out for 2021, it’s sure to be a great year, especially with our strategic partners working together to bring the best solutions to the market.  If you would like more information on Iron Bow’s technology capabilities or Intel’s AI offerings, simply click on the corresponding hyperlinks.