Today I hop on a train to travel to Philadelphia for our National Quilt gathering of Research and Education (R&E) organizations. This is always an enjoyable week for me as I get to collaborate with some of the smartest most trusted and naturally genuine people I know. We all have similar missions at the highest level whilst localization and business models constrain and focus each of us in slightly different ways. The collaboration between us is highly valuable and my respect for these folks is well deserved.
As we hurtle though the AI and Quantum Era, I find myself immersed with the natural process of understanding how our organization will address the many opportunities and challenges the new technologies bring to our enterprise internally and what we can do to help our Members adapt.
One thing I know will not change; Our Purpose. OSHEAN’s purpose has not changed since its founding in 1999. Through the bandwidth explosions, cybersecurity emergence, Cloud migrations and now AI, we continue to endeavor to be an extension of our Membership staffs and respond to their missions. It’s why we themed our upcoming Member Conference “Complexity is a Team Sport”.
I often think of the R&E community as a well-kept secret. This is in part due to the fact that most of us don’t spend much on marketing. We are content to work directly with our Members and put our investments in them, producing the best offerings possible. Our foundation is our networks which are second to none. The technology and the problems they solve are complex and dynamic. I sometimes can’t believe we have 400Gbps middle mile in production. These highly meshed, segment routed, low latency and symmetric networks cater to the critical payloads that will now include a heavy dose of AI.
We have tried over the years to communicate the “Value of a REN” and the answers are very compelling but as the years go by, we are constantly challenged with answering the question; Why us? This is evident again in the AI and Quantum eras. The R&E community is once again stepping up to the technical complexity and market urgency of hyperbolic predictions with extraordinary ramifications, and we do so wearing our Members’ hats. Quietly, our community has been immersed in understanding developments and impacts these technologies bring and we do sometimes question whether this is a revolution or an evolution for us. All over the country the R&E community is leading efforts to build AI coalitions for everything from workforce development, infrastructure resource collaboration and technical network and instrumentation developments for AI flows. Quantum workshops abound and our colleagues are working on things like Post Quantum Cryptography testing and understanding Classical and Quantum network flow coexistence and performance.
This is part one of a two part blog this week. Stay tuned to part two and I will report the highlights of the conference!