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News briefs: Koch Industries picks Alkira, Palo Alto
Koch industries combines Alkira networking and Palo Alto security for remote office connectivity; Cisco promotes three women on International Women's Day; AT&T, Fortinet partner.
Koch Industries, a private conglomerate of multiple companies, chose Alkira and Palo Alto Networks to connect remote offices and employees to data centers and public clouds.
The two tech vendors announced the customer win this week. The deal includes Alkira's network as a service and Palo Alto's Panorama firewall management software, which Alkira delivers with its partner's VM-Series of virtual firewalls.
Koch companies range from oil and gas and agriculture to minerals and pulp and paper. Based in Wichita, Kan., the company has $115 billion in annual revenue, according to Fortune magazine.
The companies did not disclose the deal's value.
AT&T, Fortinet partner on SASE offering
AT&T has partnered with Fortinet to add a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering to the carrier's portfolio of managed security services.
AT&T SASE with Fortinet, launched this week, uses a SASE framework to deliver Fortinet's network security and software-defined WAN as a managed service. SASE is primarily a collection of cloud-based services that secure each endpoint on the network. Delivered features include URL filtering, DNS and a secure web gateway.
Companies can integrate the AT&T-Fortinet offering with the carrier's Alien Labs Threat Intelligence. The platform provides continuous information on the latest cyberthreats and offers countermeasures.
PBX-Change offers Juniper SD-WAN
PBX-Change, a VoIP and internet services provider, has picked Juniper Networks' software-defined WAN to deliver unified communications and business continuity services.
PBX-Change, which announced the partnership this week, said the Juniper SD-WAN's efficient use of bandwidth would raise PBX-Change's UC services' reliability.
The Juniper SD-WAN uses technology from the acquisition of 128 Technology. The product applies a session-based approach to SD-WAN routing that uses significantly less bandwidth than competing products, analysts said. As a result, there's a significant reduction in latency problems.
PBX-Change is the name Florida-based Tampabay DSL uses to do business.
Cisco celebrates International Women's Day with three promotions
Cisco promoted three women on International Women's Day, including Maria Martinez to COO.
Martinez had led Cisco's customer service operation for more than two years. As COO, she will continue to be responsible for customer service and the rest of Cisco's business operations, including sales, engineering and supply chain.
Martinez replaces Irving Tan, who moved from COO to the chairman of Cisco's Asia Pacific, Japan and China operations.
Other leadership changes at Cisco included promoting Liz Centoni to chief strategy officer and general manager of applications. Her responsibilities will include Cisco's AppDynamics business.
Centoni was senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's cloud, compute and IoT business before the new position.
Also, Cisco promoted Fran Katsoudas, the head of its human resources and community outreach organization, to chief people, policy and purpose officer. Cisco's global government affairs and country digital acceleration team will become a part of Katsoudas' new organization.
International Women's Day is a worldwide holiday celebrated on March 8. The day commemorates women's cultural, socioeconomic and political achievements.