"The goal is to incentivize customers to return old or outdated equipment for refurbishment and to be made available again to the right customer," Linda D’Amico said.

Interestingly, its rival Cisco recently took the exact opposite path to expand its secure access service edge reach.

Gartner predicts 40% of enterprises will be working toward unachievable multi-cloud expectations by 2027.

This shift is a cultural change within the I&O organization. "It is a change in thinking and an evolution," Gartner's Jeffrey Hewitt said.

The challenge is that vendors have a tendency to call everything network-as-a-service, "and it really isn't NaaS half the time," Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner said.

"I feel like I could actually just scream," Gartner Analyst Jeffrey Hewitt said of the talent shortage's tenacity.

"You use the word innovation incorrectly," Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner told the networking vendors in the audience.

By 2025, 50% of edge computing solutions deployed before a strategy has taken shape will fail to meet enterprise goals, Gartner says.

Forrester Analyst Lee Sustar expects AWS to acquire one or more startups or a major security player for the managed detection and response service.

Aryaka VP Craig Patterson sung the praises of managed SD-WAN as a crucial failsafe for maintaining enterprise network uptime.

D-Wave's recent survey shows the majority of the organizations are already engaging in quantum computing early adopter activities.

Managed services can offer “extensive knowledge and expertise” to ease the transition to secure access service edge, Ron Ronco said.

The company plans to aid service providers with network dead zones, then use its crypto assets to donate cell deployments in under-connected areas.

"When you have these broad zero-day events that impact many industries ... that's where things like SBOM come into play," Jennifer Morovitz said.

Remote work that goes beyond calendars and meeting links: “that's a real problem, but the metaverse is not the solution to that,” Adam Riggs said.

“The one thing that's common across the board is the desire to modernize and become more cloud-like," AWS' Jan Hofmeyr said of telecom operators.

Douglas Bellin said the average machine age across manufacturing globally is 25 years old, meaning most equipment can't communicate with a 5G radio.

“The thing I love about Cisco is we are encouraged to have what we call 'courageous conversations,'” said the Native American Network ERG Co-Lead.

Gartner argues organizations should understand what translates from IT-centric zero-trust strategy to cyber physical systems.

"The reality is that we already have in almost every operator at least two, if not three, hyperscalers in play," Red Hat's Ian Hood said.

Windstream Director Chris Alberding said "the cost is going down" and "the ease of implementation is going up" for data loss protection.

As secure access service edge adoption continues across industries Gartner is seeing a particular emphasis on single-vendor strategy.

"I know in the quantum realm, our biggest challenge is people and the workforce and talent development," Laura Thomas said.

"Reducing complexity is where cloud-native needs to evolve," OutSystems' Barry Goffe told SDxCentral.