What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is everywhere on stage, but production AI is won in the details. From HPE Discover, we sit down with Jason Schradel, Director of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA, to unpack what it really takes to build an “AI factory” that an enterprise can deploy, operate, and scale without turning every upgrade into a science project. If you’re try...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A hospital breach can turn the network “dirty” in minutes. A fiber cut can take a grocery store offline at the worst possible time. And almost every CIO has said some version of the same thing: “I love the technology, help me find the money.” That’s the tension we dig into with John Tonthat CRO of Cellhub, one of T-Mobile’s longest-ten...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest attackers don’t “hack” like they used to, they drift through systems, blend into normal behavior, and move at machine speed. That reality forces a hard question: if you cannot defend the perimeter anymore, what should a modern security architecture look like? We sit down with James Karimi, CIO and CISO of GTT Communications...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A two-week simulation was all it took for “autonomous AI agents with rules” to reveal how fragile our current guardrails really are. We sit down with Satya Nitta from Emergence AI, an autonomous AI lab working at the intersection of neural networks and symbolic AI, to unpack the Emergence World Experiment: five virtual cities, ten agen...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t magic, and it definitely isn’t free. We sit down with Ken from Pega Systems to get brutally practical about the economics of enterprise AI: why token costs are a symptom, why infrastructure spend is so high, and how “murky ROI” happens when companies deploy AI for novelty instead of measurable business value. From Ken’s perspe...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Hybrid communications is easy to praise and hard to pull off, especially when your reality includes on-prem systems, private cloud requirements, public cloud apps, and a growing buy-in committee that can hit dozens of stakeholders. We talk with Jonathan Buckle, VP of the Americas at Mitel, about what hybrid unified communications actua...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI in telecom is finally graduating from slide decks to real operational impact, but the jump from pilot to production is where most teams get stuck. I sit down with Guy Lupo from the TM Forum, who leads the trustworthy AI and data mission, to talk about what it actually takes to become an AI native telco and why the industry’s next ga...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The easiest system to hack is the one that’s always there to be found. We sit down with Steve Visconti, CEO and co-founder of XIID, to talk about a different cybersecurity mindset: architectural invisibility, where the goal isn’t to build a bigger wall, it’s to make the target unreachable in the first place. We dig into what “no inboun...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A 2005 malware sample sounds like ancient history, until it looks like cyber sabotage that may predate Stuxnet. We sit down with Jags from SentinelOne’s Sentinel Labs to unpack Fast 16, a rare framework that doesn’t just break computers, it quietly corrupts high precision calculations. If you’ve ever treated simulation results, enginee...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Personalized phishing is no longer “spray and pray.” It’s targeted, multi-channel, and increasingly powered by exposed employee data that’s sitting in plain sight. We sit down with Paul Mander, Chief Commercial Officer at Optery for Business, to unpack what’s driving the next wave of AI-driven social engineering and why so many securit...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your phone rings, you hesitate, and you let it go to voicemail because it might be a scam. Meanwhile your team is juggling Microsoft Teams, Webex, mobile calling, messaging apps and a growing stack of AI tools that promise better customer experience but often add complexity. We sit down with William Rubio to unpack what’s actually chan...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your product can have a world-class cloud stack and a blazing-fast 5G link, then lose the whole experience in the last half meter. That’s the “last meter” problem, and it’s why we sat down with Dr. Frederic Nabki Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Spark Microsystems, to talk about ultra-wideband wireless that targets wirelike resp...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your carrier has more data than almost any company you interact with, yet most telcos still struggle to turn that advantage into growth. We sit down with Miguel Carames, the Chief Product Officer at Mobileum to sort out what’s real, what’s next, and what’s pure hype when it comes to AI in telecom, 5G monetization, and the future of ope...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com If your SOC is buried under alert noise, another flashy AI demo won’t save you. We go deeper into what actually works: starting with data strategy and detection quality so automation has real signal to work with, not chaos to summarize. Our guest CEO and Founder Karthik Kannan from Anvilogic explains what “agentic SecOps” looks like in...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Cloud was supposed to simplify everything. Instead, a lot of CIOs are staring at bills that are far higher than anyone forecast, feeling locked into hyperscalers, and wondering where the business value went. I sit down with David Linthicum, former Deloitte chief cloud strategy officer turned tech influencer, to give an unvarnished real...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your backup system is sitting on a gold mine and most companies are treating it like a fire extinguisher behind glass. From the floor of Dell Technologies World, we talk with Simon Taylor CEO of HYCU about their next chapter: HYCU Air, an AI resiliency platform designed to turn SaaS backup data into something you can actually interroga...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest way to break a modern network isn’t your Netflix download, it’s the quiet, constant upload from sensors, logs, and telemetry that nobody ever reads. We sit down with Julien Dersey from AtomBeam to unpack why data efficiency is suddenly a front-line issue for IoT networking, edge computing, and cloud operations, even in a wo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com ANZ moves fast, and that speed exposes the difference between “cloud by default” and communications that actually hold up under pressure. We sit down with Mitel and Ethan Global to unpack what it takes to deliver unified communications, contact center, and customer experience platforms across Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacif...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your AI assistant is only as smart as the mess behind your dashboards. When business data lives across CRM, accounting, HR, and job systems, “connect ChatGPT to our data” quickly turns into rate limits, broken joins, confusing IDs, and answers nobody trusts. We sit down with Craig Morrall, co-founder of Tugger, to unpack a practical ar...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI agents are starting to do real work inside real companies and they often do it by acting as us. That’s exciting, and it’s also a security wake-up call. We sit down with Matthew Immler Regional CSO, Americas at Okta, to unpack why identity security has become the primary battleground and why attackers increasingly prefer impersonatio...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Healthcare keeps getting more expensive, yet most of us feel like we’re doing more work just to get the same care: more portals, more forms, more phone calls, and more confusing lab results. We sit down with Greg Brady the founder and CEO of Connect4Patients to dig into the root cause he’s spent decades solving in other industries: fra...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is finally forcing a scoreboard moment in telecom: some organizations are seeing massive productivity gains, while others are stuck between fear of missing out and fear of getting it wrong. From the floor at IBM Think in Boston, we sit down with IBM’s global CTO for telecom, media, and entertainment Eoin Coughlan to get practical ab...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI didn’t just change how enterprises innovate, it changed how they get breached. One month you’re racing to deploy new copilots and agentic workflows; the next you’re asking a harder question: did we build any of this to match our risk posture? We talk with Chris Bonavita, Vice President of Strategy and Technology Adoption at GTT, abo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your browser is no longer a passive window to the internet. It’s becoming a worker with autonomy and that single shift changes everything about cybersecurity, identity, and data protection. We sit down with Anupam Upadhyaya SVP, Products, SASE and Network Security, Palo Alto Networks to unpack what “agentic browsing” really means: the...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Pool season is back and so is the annual question: why does keeping water clean still feel so manual? We sit down with Patrick from Beatbot to talk about what changes when a robotic pool cleaner stops being a “dumb” tethered machine and becomes a cordless AI pool robot that can map your pool, plan an efficient route, and adapt when it...