What's Up with Tech?

Evan Kirstel
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Technology

Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!

  1. 5d ago

    What Tech Expo 26 Reveals About The Future Of Broadband

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Speed used to be the headline for broadband. Now the real question is tougher: did your internet actually feel reliable all day, on every device, in every room? We talk with Janelle Morse from SCTE, an industry insider helping shape Tech Expo 26 in Atlanta, about why the broadband world is pivoting toward end-to-end customer experience and what that means for operators, engineers, and anyone building modern networks. We break down the event’s theme, “convergence powered, experience protected,” and why convergence is no longer a buzzword. Fiber, HFC, DOCSIS, Wi-Fi, wireless broadband, and even satellite increasingly have to operate as one coordinated system. That pushes the industry toward cloud-native architectures, more virtualization, and more intelligence at the edge, because the network boundary now extends into the connected home where “my Wi-Fi is my internet” becomes the customer’s reality. AI is the accelerant. Instead of vague promises, we get into concrete use cases like network diagnostics, predictive service assurance, fault detection, and optimization, plus the next step: autonomous networks and self-healing operations that can sense issues, predict failures, and take action before customers ever notice. We also talk about how Tech Expo is structured, what to prioritize when you attend, why the expo floor matters, and how workforce skills and upskilling fit into an AI-driven future. If you care about broadband innovation, network reliability, and what’s next for customer experience, hit play, share it with a colleague, and subscribe for more. If you’ve got a strong opinion on fiber vs DOCSIS or where AI should help first, leave a review and tell us what you’re seeing. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  2. Sep 21

    Why 100G Networking Is Suddenly A Day To Day Enterprise Problem

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 100G Ethernet quietly crossed a line from “carrier-only” to “normal enterprise,” and the operational fallout is real: bigger links mean bigger outages, higher stakes, and far less room for sloppy assumptions. We sit down with NetAlly CEO Jeff O’Mara and Product Lead Thomas Doumas to break down why 100G networking is showing up in enterprise environments now, how AI-driven demand is accelerating the bandwidth curve, and what network teams need to do differently when the speed jumps beyond 10G. We get specific about what actually gets harder at 25G, 40G, and 100G. Auto-negotiation habits that feel natural at lower speeds often do not apply, so both ends of the link can require careful hard-coded settings, with many possible port modes and only a few that will work. Add the “fussy” world of fiber optics at 100G, where connector cleanliness and tiny physical issues can become real failures, and you can see why misconfiguration and optical problems dominate modern troubleshooting. We also unpack NetAlly’s approach to AI-assisted troubleshooting through what they call Ally Intelligence: guided, field-tested workflows that turn broad complaints into checkable root causes, without relying on generic chat outputs. Then we talk economics and accountability, including how to validate that a 100G service or upgrade is performing to spec, reduce guesswork, and shorten “time to innocence” when the network gets blamed. We close with the upgrade reality of old and new running together, classic landmines like spanning tree, and what comes next as the industry heads toward 400G. If you want practical, enterprise-focused guidance on testing, troubleshooting, and validating high-speed networks, hit subscribe, share this with your network team, and leave a review. What’s the hardest part of supporting 100G where you work? Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  3. Sep 18

    How Enterprise AI Agents Break Budgets And How To Fix It

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your AI budget isn’t blowing up because someone asked too many questions. It’s blowing up because AI agents turn one request into a chain reaction of inference calls, and the infrastructure underneath can’t deliver fast tokens efficiently at scale. We sit down with Vasanth Mohan from SambaNova to get specific about what changes when AI moves from “chat” to “do,” and why enterprises suddenly feel latency, throughput, and cost as operational constraints. We break down the difference between training and AI inference, then zoom into the agentic reality: swarms of agents, model tiering, and the constant balancing act between tokens per second per request and tokens per second per chip. You’ll hear how model size drives memory pressure, why batching affects your bill, and how to decide when “fast enough” is actually costing you productivity, especially for coding workflows and other tight feedback loops. Then we go hardware-deep in plain language. Vasant explains SambaNova’s reconfigurable dataflow unit (RDU), why mapping dataflow graphs to silicon can change performance, and how disaggregated inference splits prefill from decode. We also talk about GPUs working alongside other chips, extending the life of existing deployments, and why energy efficiency and air-cooled data centers matter for sovereign AI and global rollouts. We close with a reality check on benchmarks, “benchmaxing,” and why private evals and testing on your own workloads are the only trustworthy path. If you care about enterprise AI, AI agents, inference optimization, and the real economics of tokens, hit subscribe, share this with a builder on your team, and leave a review with the toughest inference problem you’re trying to solve. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  4. Sep 8

    How Enterprise Tech Awards Help Buyers Find Real Innovation

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Enterprise tech is having a weird moment: innovation is real, but so is the noise. AI shows up in every pitch, “leading” is used in every sentence, and buyers who actually have budgets and deadlines are stuck asking the same question: what’s genuinely worth my time? I’m joined by Rose Ross, founder and chief Trailblazer at the Tech Trailblazers Awards, to talk about how credible startup awards can act as a practical filter for enterprise IT leaders and a meaningful growth lever for founders. We dig into what makes an enterprise tech awards program valuable instead of performative: clear criteria, a respected panel of judges, and an emphasis on proof over polish. Rose shares how the Tech Trailblazers Awards grew into its 15th edition across categories like cybersecurity, networking, telecoms, containers, sustainability, AI in a B2B context, plus newer frontiers like robotics and quantum computing. We also talk about why customer impact matters more than “sexiness,” and how buyers can use awards as a shortlist without outsourcing their judgment. If you’re a founder or operator, we get very specific on the practical side: who can enter (nine years or younger and not beyond Series C), the Firestarter subset (three years or younger with no Series A), how to think about the entry like an investor pitch deck, and what judges hate most. The simplest advice wins: answer the question, drop the vague buzzwords, and back every claim with evidence. Subscribe for more founder and enterprise tech conversations, share this with a builder or buyer who needs a better filter, and leave a review with the best buzzword you never want to hear again. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  5. Sep 1

    How Broadcom And VMware Protect Dynamic AI Workloads

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Agentic AI is showing up everywhere, and it is not waiting for your security program to catch up. From the VMware Explore floor, we talk with Umesh Mahajan, General Manager for Broadcom’s Application Networking and Security Division, about what changes when AI agents become real workloads that talk constantly, call tools through APIs, and evolve by the week. The headline is uncomfortable but useful: AI helps defenders ship faster, but Frontier AI also helps attackers find vulnerabilities and drive more zero-day behavior than many teams are ready to handle. We dig into the security model that holds up when agents are dynamic and mistakes travel fast. Umesh explains why you have to solve a dual problem: protecting agents from attacks while also preventing a compromised or misdirected agent from attacking others. That leads to concrete priorities like lateral segmentation, distributed firewalling, IDS/IPS, and NDR-style behavioral detection, plus network-level controls to reduce the risk of sensitive data exfiltration. We also talk about discovery, because shadow AI is already a reality. If you cannot identify which agents, MCP tools, servers, and models are running, you cannot confidently separate authorized usage from risky sprawl. Finally, we tackle the fear every operator has: security that slows the business down. We cover why performance and latency matter more for AI workloads, how enforcement close to the hypervisor can reduce overhead, and what it takes to deploy protection quickly so “bought but not deployed” does not become your weak spot. If you’re building enterprise AI on VMware infrastructure, this is a practical map for getting safer without stalling momentum. Subscribe for more VMware Explore conversations, share this with the person owning AI rollout, and leave a review with your biggest question about securing agentic AI. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  6. Sep 1

    How To Secure Enterprise AI Agents With VMware Tanzu

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Frontier AI is changing the rules of security, and enterprises feel it first. From the floor at VMware Explore, we sit down with Purnima Padmanabhan Vice President and General Manager, Tanzu Division, to unpack what customers are asking for as AI agents move into real systems and real data. The headline: private AI is getting a serious bump, not as a trend, but as a control strategy for regulated industries and anyone worried about risk, governance, and cost.  We walk through the “threat side” of AI, where advanced models can amplify attacks and push open source security to a breaking point. Purima explains why so many enterprise applications depend on open source, especially Spring and Java, and what happens when vulnerability reports spike. We also dig into TrueSource by Broadcom, the idea of a secure software supply chain for curated open source packages, libraries, and images that enterprises can trust and operationalize.  Then we shift to the “opportunity side”: moving beyond chat and RAG into workflow automation with enterprise AI agents. That raises hard questions about sandboxing, limiting autonomy, and keeping agents secure. Just as important, we talk about why data projects slow everything down, and why governed access to the right data is what makes agents useful at scale.  Finally, we get practical about developer experience and SDLC automation, including Purima’s example of running a swarm of 21+ agents across planning, Jira creation, coding, and testing, plus the caution that not all AI-generated code is equal. If you’re building on VMware Tanzu, thinking about private cloud AI, or trying to balance security, sovereignty, and TCO, this is for you. Subscribe, share with a builder on your team, and leave a review. What would make you trust an AI agent in production? Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  7. Aug 28

    Trustworthy AI For High Stakes Decisions

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is making decisions that shape real lives, yet most people cannot see how those decisions get made. We sit down with Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer at FICO, to unpack what “trustworthy AI” actually requires when the stakes include fraud, credit risk, and customer outcomes in heavily regulated financial services. If you have ever wondered why black box models create so much fear and backlash, this conversation puts clear language around the real issues: data provenance, explainable AI, ethical testing, robustness, and the ability to audit a decision after the fact.  We go beyond buzzwords and get specific about AI governance. Scott explains why responsible AI starts with a shared model development standard, so a large organization is not running a hundred different approaches that no one can consistently defend. We talk about why monitoring is often the weakest link in real world machine learning, when to retire models that drift, and why enterprises need to stay in control instead of outsourcing critical decisions to models they did not build.  Then we dig into a practical enforcement mechanism: coupling AI governance with blockchain to create an immutable record of requirements, testing, verification, and release decisions. Think of it as an operating manual that travels with the model and can be inspected years later by regulators, customers, or internal teams. We also look ahead to what changing regulation could mean, including the push toward interpretable models, trust scoring for generative AI, and focused language models or small language models built for narrow tasks with auditable data.  If you care about responsible AI, AI transparency, and building systems people can actually trust, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a friend who works in AI or compliance, and leave a review with the one governance rule you think every model should follow. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

  8. Aug 27

    How NVIDIA Turns Computing Into A New Lab Partner

    Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Drug discovery is one of the hardest engineering problems on Earth, except it has not always been treated like engineering. Costs can hover around $2 billion per successful drug, timelines can run 10+ years, and too many patients still wait without a cure. We sit down with Rory Kelleher, who leads global business development for life sciences at NVIDIA, to talk about what changes when accelerated computing meets foundation models, generative AI, and agentic AI that can actually do work. We break down how scientific agents differ from chatbots, and why tools matter as much as models. Rory explains NVIDIA’s BioNEMO Agent Toolkit and the idea of turning core life sciences capabilities into “agent skills” so biologists and chemists can run complex workflows through natural language. We talk protein design and protein binder design, co-folding, bioinformatics, target identification, and ADMET prediction for toxicity and safety, plus why this wave can “democratize” computational drug discovery for scientists who were never trained as programmers. You’ll also hear a real example from Bristol Myers Squibb, where foundation models trained on proprietary sequences and compound libraries helped improve a sickle cell molecule profile until it reached first-in-human testing. We dig into what an “AI factory” looks like inside pharma, why teams want to run open models and local LLMs on secure infrastructure, and why scientific judgment becomes more important, not less, as agents increase throughput. If you care about biotech, pharma R&D, life sciences AI, and the future of medicine, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend in research, and leave a review with the one workflow you want agents to tackle next. Support the show More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!

Information

  • Creator
    Evan Kirstel
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    677
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 TechInfluencer
  • Show Website
    What's Up with Tech?