From deadly wildfires to President Donald Trump's impeachment trial, the death of basketball legend Kobe Bryant, Brexit, murder hornets, and social unrest over the killing of George Floyd – all under the cloud of the COVID-19 pandemic – 2020 has been a doozy and we're only halfway through it.

Despite the enduring chaos 2020 has thrown down, technology has kept communities connected, businesses afloat, and tethered us to some semblance of stability. Here's a look back at what the industry has already weathered during the first half of 2020.

Arista Networks kicked off 2020 with the acquisition of SDN vendor Big Switch Networks. Arista made the acquisition official one month later during its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings call. 

The purchase marked the networking vendor’s third acquisition. Arista in 2018 snapped up cloud-managed WiFi firm Mojo Networks and then a month later bought Metamako, a provider of low-latency field programmable gate array (FPGA) products. 

SAP continued to aggressively push its operational transformation with the latest move around a revamping of its organizational structure and showing a pair of board members the door. 

The organizational revamp included the reassignment of operational divisions to its executive team and the trimming of its board. Those moves increased SAP’s focus on its cloud business, which showed a 35% year-over-year increase in revenues during the fourth quarter of 2019.

SAP has since eliminated its dual-leadership structure with long-time executive and short-time co-CEO Jennifer Morgan leaving the company. Simultaneously, the “co” was removed from Christian Klein’s previous title, leaving him as SAP’s lone leader. The company also lost Todd McElhatton, who served as SVP and CFO of SAP’s Cloud Business Group, to cloud-based subscription management platform provider Zuora in June.

McElhatton’s departure came two months after SAP extended the contract of its current CFO Luka Mucic for five years, which now runs through March 2026.

Before the COVID-19 crisis, Cisco averaged between 20,000 and 30,000 daily remote connections from employees working from home. Now that all Cisco employees — like those at most other companies — work remotely, it averaged more than 170,000 remote network connections daily across 96 countries and 498 cities by late March.

Cisco’s Webex logged more than 12 billion meeting minutes in the first three weeks of March, said Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people officer.

Cisco also came up with a five-pronged approach to enable its employees and partners to work from home: strengthen basic connectivity, enable remote collaboration, enhance technical and customer experience, address special use cases, and stay secure.

VMware said it had more than 15,000 Virtual Cloud Network customers by early April, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 telecommunications operators. Specific to SD-WAN, which is one piece of the virtual networking stack, more than 225,000 branch offices have deployed VMware’s SD-WAN, said Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit. “We are the No. 1 vendor in SD-WAN,” Gillis said.

VMware based its claim on IHS Markit’s fourth-quarter 2019 SD-WAN market report, Frost and Sullivan’s 2019 data, and Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. 

Cisco struck back against VMware’s No. 1 SD-WAN vendor claims with a blog post touting its SD-WAN market leadership, citing Dell’Oro Group's placement of Cisco as the No. 1 vendor in SD-WAN market share and Gartner naming it the 2020 Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for WAN Edge Infrastructure.

Omdia further fueled the drama days later when it released its latest Data Center Network Equipment Market Tracker. The report found that VMware continues to lead the worldwide SD-WAN market with the highest revenue share (16.3%), followed by Cisco (13%), and Fortinet (12.3%).

VMware and Cisco have consistently jockeyed for the top SD-WAN vendor title since purchasing VeloCloud and Viptela, respectively, in 2017. VMware paid $449 million for VeloCloud, and Cisco paid $610 million for Viptela.

IBM reportedly slashed jobs as it braced against operational challenges tied to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The cuts were first reported in mid-May by Bloomberg. That report indicated that the cuts impact jobs across different IBM divisions with a specific mention of its Global Technology Services division. That division, which includes IBM’s Infrastructure and Cloud Services and its Technology Support Services businesses, posted a 4% year-over-year drop in revenues for IBM’s most recent first quarter.

It would appear that the extra capital has been put to use. IBM inked a deal to buy cloud security posture management startup Spanugo for an undisclosed amount in mid-June.

Cisco threw its full weight behind the secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, thus eliminating any doubt that the Gartner-coined network and security category is more than hype in May, and weeks later took a step closer to realizing its SASE ambitions with the latest update to its SD-WAN software stack.

A bevy of features that enable customers to begin the migration from SD-WAN to Cisco’s newly announced SASE architecture are at the core of the update.

Cisco, however, is far from the first to adopt SASE, which stitches together SD-WAN and security functionality into a single cloud-native service. Numerous vendors including Cato Networks and Palo Alto Networks, which announced SASE products nearly a year before Cisco, have also made similar claims.