Welcome to the Day 1 Recap of #MFD3 from my perspective. Mist Systems started the day off with quite the presentation as myself and the other delegates sat through 2 hours of high energy and excitement from the likes of Bob Friday, CTO, Sudheer Matta, VP of Products, and Jeff Aaron, VP of Marketing. I’ll be honest, if you weren’t able to tune into the livestream yesterday, you DEFINITELY need to watch the recording once they are posted online. Sudheer always brings his “A” game when presenting, and it’s so full of substance you can feel how much he loves what he’s doing at Mist. Combine that with the amazing commentary and insights around AI, deep learning, and neural networking provided by Bob and it made the 2 hours feel more like 20 minutes by the time it was over.

I have to say the one thing that got me most excited, was to see how Mist is going about creating a culture where the customer isn’t just a vehicle to push product onto, but more like a family member. Name one other vendor in the WLAN space that utilizes their machine learning algorithms to proactively reach out to the customer when an issue is identified. Yes, you read that right….PROACTIVE. That blew me away. Having been involved in IT for a number of years, including a tenure at Meru Networks for a while, I simply couldn’t believe how much Mist truly cares about being ahead of the game and fixing issues before the customer even knows they are happening. When Mist says that they are a partner and not just a vendor to the customer, they truly mean it. The scalability at which they can accommodate network growth, proactively resolve issues, and provide what right now is probably “best in class” AI/Machine Learning across the WLAN industry is truly amazing to see out of a company that is only 2 years old. I won’t go much into the technical details of the preso since you will be able to view that independently of this blog, but the WLAN market should beware that Mist is out there….and they’re coming for you! If you are a customer reading this, be sure to check this group out. I personally can’t wait to get my hands on a Mist AP or two to try out and dive deeper into this super interesting system they’ve created.

We also were able to visit with the team at Arista, home of the recently acquired Mojo Networks as well. They are also diving into the “Cognitive” world, as they coined it, by introducing machine learning into the full stack, where soon they envision a world where the management plane for a wireless network or wired network is truly vendor agnostic. Within that world, the data can be streamed from any device into an engine capable of doing some interesting things that without having full insight to every single device in the network. Be sure to check out my friend Lee Badman’s post about Arista/Mojo that can be found here. He has some good insights into this marriage of cognitive networking and cloud driven wireless.

Day 2 starts soon, so be sure to tune in here and check out the livestream today and post your questions on twitter that you might want asked of the presenters using the hashtag #MFD3 or you can send to any of the delegates including myself @theITrebel