Built For Trust With Nick Lippis
Oct 8, 2026 · 53 min · 9 segments
Enterprise networks carry decades of legacy gear, dozens of OS variants, and change processes that can take a hundred signatures to approve. AI promises to take network operations further, but how…
Well, I think that, I mean, if we step back and look at the major things that have affected this industry, clearly, and it's no longer the leading edge trend, but it was for a while, is cloud.
it pulled the boundaries of the enterprise past the actual, you know, the four walls and the things that you owned, right? So what constitutes network and IT infrastructure now is much more distributed and dispersed and much less under your control, right? So there's that aspect that I think had a huge impact and which then...
And, you know, if we look at the networking industry and you talk about hardware and then why was observability...
And the reason for that was because so much of the way networking was done was captive to the major hardware vendors.
So if you bought their stuff, you bought their management stack and all that.
And even if you're then, you know, obviously a somewhat, you could say like side industry of tools developed as major competitors had more and more market share and just wasn't one big, you know, monolith in the market.
But even so, I think the cloud actually then really made it obvious that you had to think beyond just these a couple of pieces in your network and your own four walls.
And I think that made, and the availability of SaaS meant that you could do things in these tools just like with every other kind of application that you hadn't contemplated before.
And it created a lot of innovation, right? So if you think about Kentik, for example, which was taking, you know, metric data of various types, telemetry and observability data that was increasingly volumetric.
It was making less and less sense to try to store that on your own appliances and hard drives, but you could store near infinite amount of that in the cloud.
And ThousandEyes did a similar thing of saying, hey, you've got all these internet-facing applications, and your network's not just your network, it's the internet.
So now you're going to build a SaaS with an idea of all these synthetic monitoring agents all over the globe.
So it started pulling the view of what constitutes network operations to a more abstract place than just, we have these pieces of hardware, from this vendor so of course we buy their stuff or we buy some other thing um just to to do the basics and i think in addition cloud and sas has been put us on this continuum of speed the speed of everything has has you know accelerated right business speed technology change the expectations of users right has changed so much and that's driven uh and it's also with all the internet and cloud and everything, made security and all those things harder.
The reason why, and with AI, it's just even more so, the reason why all the observability and automation has become more important is velocity, that the criticality network in the center of all this high stakes digital economy means that you just can't ignore it, right? So I think that's what I think back a little bit.
Well, I think that, I mean, if we step back and look at the major things that have affected this industry, clearly, and it's no longer the leading edge trend, but it was for a while, is cloud.
it pulled the boundaries of the enterprise past the actual, you know, the four walls and the things that you owned, right? So what constitutes network and IT infrastructure now is much more distributed and dispersed and much less under your control, right? So there's that aspect that I think had a huge impact and which then...
And, you know, if we look at the networking industry and you talk about hardware and then why was observability...
And the reason for that was because so much of the way networking was done was captive to the major hardware vendors.
So if you bought their stuff, you bought their management stack and all that.
And even if you're then, you know, obviously a somewhat, you could say like side industry of tools developed as major competitors had more and more market share and just wasn't one big, you know, monolith in the market.
But even so, I think the cloud actually then really made it obvious that you had to think beyond just these a couple of pieces in your network and your own four walls.
And I think that made, and the availability of SaaS meant that you could do things in these tools just like with every other kind of application that you hadn't contemplated before.
And it created a lot of innovation, right? So if you think about Kentik, for example, which was taking, you know, metric data of various types, telemetry and observability data that was increasingly volumetric.
It was making less and less sense to try to store that on your own appliances and hard drives, but you could store near infinite amount of that in the cloud.
And ThousandEyes did a similar thing of saying, hey, you've got all these internet-facing applications, and your network's not just your network, it's the internet.
So now you're going to build a SaaS with an idea of all these synthetic monitoring agents all over the globe.
So it started pulling the view of what constitutes network operations to a more abstract place than just, we have these pieces of hardware, from this vendor so of course we buy their stuff or we buy some other thing um just to to do the basics and i think in addition cloud and sas has been put us on this continuum of speed the speed of everything has has you know accelerated right business speed technology change the expectations of users right has changed so much and that's driven uh and it's also with all the internet and cloud and everything, made security and all those things harder.
The reason why, and with AI, it's just even more so, the reason why all the observability and automation has become more important is velocity, that the criticality network in the center of all this high stakes digital economy means that you just can't ignore it, right? So I think that's what I think back a little bit.
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