Check out our top 10 articles of 2021 covering the SDxCentral universe of cloud, telecom, security, and networking. Rankings are based on unique visitors aggregated during the year.

VMware’s board of directors had a distinct choice between promoting a charismatic leader or a tenured technologist to succeed former CEO Pat Gelsinger. Read more.

Software components tap into Juniper's acquisition of intent-based networking vendor Apstra. Read more.

In a memo to Intel staff, Gelsinger called on the company to take the necessary steps to restore the company's leadership position in the semiconductor market. Read more.

“Well, I think the big winner is Michael [Dell],” analyst Zeus Kerravala said. “It’s not like he needs more money, but he stands to make a boatload of money.” Read more.

Stephen Augustus was previously a senior open source engineer at VMware and has a long history in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes communities. Read more.

Palo Alto Networks will soon change its licensing for all of its software firewalls and security services to a consumption-based model. Read more.

"It seems appropriate that as we were getting people moving from Palo Alto [Networks], that the appropriate place for them to move was Oahu," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said. Read more.

Nutanix cut its global headcount by about 2.5%, primarily in sales and marketing jobs. “We expect this action to yield approximately $50 million in annual savings,” CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said. Read more.

The general consensus among pundits and analysts is that CEO Pat Gelsinger’s departure doesn’t bode well for VMware — at least in the short term. Read more.

Cisco’s current annual research and development budget is about $6 billion, and the bulk of this investment will help support hybrid work-related technologies. Read more.