What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Networks don’t “run themselves” by magic, they do it by stacking the right data, platforms, and automation logic until the network can sense trouble, reason about options, and act safely. We sit down with Rodrigo from Ericsson to unpack what autonomous networks really mean in practice: self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-configurin...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A major deal just landed in cloud communications: CallTower is acquiring Momentum Telecom. We sit down with William Rubio right after the news to explain what CallTower actually does as a managed service provider, why this acquisition matters, and what customers and partners should expect next. If you’ve ever wondered why the communica...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Resumes are getting easier to generate and harder to trust and that is forcing HR teams to rethink how hiring works from the ground up. We sit down with Navneet “Nav” Singh the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Eightfold AI. Nav from Eightfold to explore what happens when AI agents enter talent acquisition, not as a gimmick, but as a sk...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Everyone is flipping on Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents, and then realizing they can’t answer a basic question: what data can those agents actually reach? We sit down with Rick from Veeam to unpack the messy reality behind “safe AI at scale” and why AI success starts with data resilience, not demos. When agents can search, summariz...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is forcing a hard reset in telecom, and it’s not just about models or GPUs. The real shockwave hits the CIO’s mandate: reinvent IT fast enough to enable enterprise AI while still keeping the lights on across sprawling legacy stacks. We sit down with TM Forum leader and veteran CIO Willie Stegmann to break down why this moment feels...

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...

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 enter...

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...

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 Tra...

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,...

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...

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 ev...

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 s...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Everyone is obsessed with bigger models and faster GPUs, but the part that decides whether AI actually works in the real world is the data behind it. We talk with Paul Speciale CMO at Scality, about what happens when enterprises try to store, protect, and serve AI data at petabyte and exabyte scale, and why the rise of huge context win...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is cranking out more code than ever, but that doesn’t mean teams are shipping the right outcomes. From PegaWorld, I sat down with Steph Lewis, Senior Director of Community Developer Programs at Pega Systems, to unpack what’s actually changing for developers, architects, and business stakeholders as AI, agents, and LLMs reshape enter...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your CRM knows a lot about your customers, so why does it still feel like a place you go to do homework? We talk with SugarAI CEO David Roberts about the hard truth many sellers live every week: CRM has mostly evolved into a management tool, not a system that makes reps better in the moment that matters, right before a call, a meeting,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your AI demo is easy. Shipping AI inside a regulated insurance workflow is the hard part and that’s where the real advantage gets built. We sit down with Doug Marquis, CTO at ZyWave, to get specific about what’s changing in insurance technology and why “agentic AI” only matters when it reliably drives growth outcomes for agencies and b...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t just changing cybersecurity tools, it’s changing the pace of the entire fight. When attackers can scale campaigns with automation and operate at machine speed, the old rhythm of annual pen tests and quarterly reviews stops making sense. We sit down with Hom Bahmanyar Global Enablement Officer at Ridge Security, to talk about w...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is rewriting the rules of healthcare software development, but building a secure scalable healthcare platform still comes down to fundamentals: clear requirements, strong ownership, and serious engineering discipline around HIPAA compliance and PHI protection. We sit down with Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of TechnologyRivers,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Phishing used to be a numbers game. With AI, it’s becoming a personalization game and that’s exactly why “good enough” login security is quietly turning into a liability. We sit down with Dawn Manley, PhD, SVP, Product Management of Yubico to talk about why phishing-resistant authentication is now a must-have for anyone protecting high...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The leadership playbook a lot of us grew up with is starting to fail in the moments that matter most: high pressure decisions, fast growth, founder stress, and team conflict that can’t be solved with a new script. We sit down with Peter Carnochan , an executive coach who is also a psychologist and trained psychoanalyst, to talk about a...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t a side project for marketing anymore. It’s becoming the way work gets done, and that shift is happening faster than most teams can measure, govern, or even fully see. We sit down with Ed from Callan Consulting to unpack what he’s hearing directly from CMOs and heads of marketing about real-world AI adoption in tech marketing,...

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...