Can you believe October is already finished? Just like that, we're already through one-third of Q4. For many companies, though, calendar Q4 2023 is actually fiscal Q1 2024. Either way, the tech companies we cover seem to be working hard to make it an impactful quarter.

In our top story from writer Sean Michael Kerner, three former Palo Alto Networks' employees bring their cybersecurity startup Gutsy out of stealth. They're off to the races with $51 million in seed money and the concept of using process mining to improve security.

Our second-place story, from writer Taryn Plumb, covers the newest Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN from Gartner. It covers the usual vendor suspects in the SD-WAN market, but also has an interesting twist as it points to SD-WAN's increasing integrations with secure access service edge (SASE) and generative artificial intelligence (genAI).

For a related story on the state of the SD-WAN market and its direction (as seen through the eyes of our SDxCentral readers), see this story from Matt Palmer, Why Juniper, HPE Aruba and VMware are losing SD-WAN ground to security vendors.

And finally, speaking of related stories, we would be remiss if we didn't mention this story from executive editor Dan Meyer, Broadcom will miss VMware acquisition deadline (but it’s close). It was just published on October 30, so just missed the top 10 list, but in just two days it has garnered enough page views to put it in third place if we were to run the page views report today. So an honorable mention for sure — and a must-read story if you haven't seen it yet.

And as with every month, cloud, security and telecom are top of mind and on our Top 10 list. Check it out here. Rankings are based on unique visitors aggregated during the month.

A trio of former Palo Alto Networks employees formally announced their startup, Gutsy, after a year of development. Alongside the startup emerging from its stealth mode, the company announced a staggering $51 million seed round led by YL Ventures and Mayfield.

The basic premise of Gutsy is simple: to help organizations use process mining techniques to better understand, remediate and optimize security processes.

As more enterprises look to SD-WAN solutions, they have a growing number of tools, vendors and converging technologies to consider. In this — as with many other sectors — IT consulting firm Gartner aims to be a strategic guide, having recently released its newest Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN.

The report identifies market leaders as Cisco, Fortinet, HPE (Aruba), Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks and VMware and points to increasing integrations with secure access service edge (SASE) and generative artificial intelligence (genAI).

The analysis firm found the SD-WAN infrastructure market surged by 25% in 2022 and is anticipated to reach $7.5 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 10.1% by 2027, according to its 2023 IDC MarketScape on Worldwide SD-WAN Infrastructure.

“SD-WAN growth is driven by a variety of factors, including some that were the initial impetus for the development of this technology, namely an ability to optimize the performance and management of the WAN while also saving costs,” Brandon Butler, research manager of Enterprise Networks at IDC, told SDxCentral.

MEF unveiled its secure access service edge (SASE) Product and Services Certification, aiming to provide much-needed clarity and confidence to a market often clouded by uncertainty and inconsistency. “This is the most comprehensive, first-in-the-industry [SASE certification] that brings confidence to the market,” MEF CTO Pascal Menezes told SDxCentral.

The networking vendor announced a significant restructuring plan in a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 5th. The plan aims to “reallocate resources to efficiently support its strategic priorities” and is expected to cost approximately $59 million.

The most significant aspect of the plan is a major reduction in Juniper’s global workforce with the layoffs of approximately 440 people.

In response to the escalating bandwidth requirements of the modern campus amid the return-to-office (RTO) trend, Fortinet introduced its new FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 campus switches, integrating with the vendor’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security and networking services.

Fortinet introduced its new FortiGate 120G secure access service edge (SASE) appliance, featuring its Security Processor 5 custom ASIC for processing acceleration and performance boost. The vendor also partnered with Google Cloud to expand its SASE points-of-presence (PoPs) footprint.

According to Synergy Research Group, the top three cloud  providers account for 65% of the worldwide market. At the end of the first quarter of 2023, that meant 32% for AWS, 23% for Microsoft Azure and 10% for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The next 20 providers have only carved out a combined 26% slice of the pie. Of those, the ones with the highest growth rates are Oracle, Snowflake, MongoDB, Huawei and three Chinese telcos.

Nvidia’s enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) software and supercomputing platform are now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in a move to provide joint capabilities that will give Oracle a foothold in the growing AI market.

Chipmaker Broadcom has announced its latest development that promises to accelerate the rollout of higher speed optical networking technologies.

At the 49th European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2023), Broadcom unveiled its new 5 nm 200 G/lane optical pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) digital signal processor (DSP) known as the Sian BCM85822.