This year Nokia will be celebrating the 20^th anniversary of SReXperts, our customer event dedicated to exploring the evolution of IP networking across communications service provider, internet exchange provider, mission-critical enterprise, and cloud service provider applications. Under the theme of ‘Network the cloud,’ we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities ahead for our customers as they build and evolve network infrastructure to support the fast-growing demand for cloud-hosted AI workloads and applications.

With a big anniversary like this one, it is always fun to look back and reflect on how much technology has evolved, and how our day-to-day lives have changed as a result. In the early 2000s, with a young family, I happily took photos of every activity, outing, and childhood milestone. Of course, as smart phones didn’t exist then, I dutifully uploaded photos from my 2.0 MP digital camera onto my home PC for sharing, saving the special ones on CDs. Looking back, it was a very time consuming and cumbersome process – there was no automatic upload to the cloud for easier consumption and sharing. Back then a cloud was something up in the sky that typically meant rain. 

Flash forward to today, and the world has seemingly changed overnight. Not only are all our photos, videos and other content stored in the cloud - the kind that hosts storage and compute and makes it seamlessly available to consumers, businesses, and industries worldwide - but with enterprise digitalization, many of the applications and services that we rely on are also now based in the cloud. The cloud in many ways has become the new fabric of commerce and society.

If this wasn’t enough of a transformation, we are now just at the beginning of an AI super-cycle which will further evolve and change how we learn, communicate, and interact with our environment. The cloud is at the center of this wave of AI technology and innovation. So much so that by the end of this decade, the cloud is expected to support over $2 trillion in revenue worldwide, growing at over 20% year over year.

As cloud workloads grow, the vast global network of public and private data centers that underpin the cloud must also evolve and expand. Planning conversations typically focus on location, compute power, energy supply, and cooling technologies. However, there's a critical aspect that often gets overlooked: the network. The network is the nervous system of the cloud, connecting compute servers and storage inside the data center, providing critical connectivity between distributed data center facilities, and providing the on-ramp for end users to access cloud-based content, applications and services.

Looking inside the data center, AI training and inference workloads drive the need for high-speed, lossless, and low-latency networking to interconnect workloads, reduce job time completion, and prevent expensive AI compute engines from idling. Outside the data center, high-performance, secure connectivity is critical to protect sensitive data, interconnect data centers, and to enable the timely delivery of AI-based applications. Across all locations, network automation is critical for efficiently managing the increasing scale and complexity of data center networks, while also improving overall network reliability and availability.

Network infrastructure is what enables the cloud to function as a cohesive, interconnected entity. As we continue to evolve the cloud for AI and beyond, it's essential that we continue to evolve and invest in data center networks.  Advancements in areas such as scientific research, medical imaging, weather forecasting, industrial design, and so much more, all increasingly rely on AI with support from cloud and network infrastructure. 

For me personally – I’ll just be happy to have the help of a cloud-based AI-assistant to sort through, capture, and share the best of the 20+ years of photos I’ve collected. 

To learn more about the evolution of IP and data center networks, join the discussion at  #SReXperts25 or visit the Nokia Data Center Networks website.